1/ Always fun and educational when @InfiniteL88ps's recurring guest @Alex_Danco joins us for a chat. We covered world building and Alex's much loved "Michael Scott Theory of Social Class" in which we learn that if you:
👉🏻Take being called "serious" as the highest compliment;
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👉🏻Brag about driving a Subaru but would never drive a Cadillac;
👉🏻Would have a serious discussion about the relative merits of IPA beers and actually care about the opinions;
👉🏻Are proud of the fact that you know how to use chopsticks correctly;
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👉🏻Actively desire a blue checkmark on Twitter (modified for special cases like me, where it just appeared with me never applying for or seeking it);
👉🏻Become engrossed to the point of obsession with things like competing in triathlons and seek approval from your friends
4/ for such activities, well then, you are Michael Scott. (Not that that's a bad thing)
Oh, and Alex is uncertain as to my designation--I'm either "The King of Michael Scott's" or something, um, a bit darker. No doubt we'll decide that more definitively in our next chat. In the
"The fewer resentments you harbor, the happier your life will be. Why are we all such fools as to ignore this obvious lesson, which a truly rational person would have figured out by the age of 8 or 9, if not sooner?"
“I think cheerfulness is one of the most important and least appreciated virtues in the world. Anybody can bring the room down by sitting around bitching and griping, but it takes real creativity to bring the whole room up.”
“We can only be sane and responsible if we stop looking outside ourselves for strength (Big Daddy or God) or for somebody to blame (The Devil). God and Devil are real, but inside us.”
Jesse: "I think the intrinsic value of an asset is what it's worth is in itself, from owning it for, for its own sake. I think a good way to test this is to just ask yourself for
2/ any asset or anything in general, anything, whatever it is, what would be the most that you would pay for it? If you were stuck with it forever?"
~@Jesse_Livermore
Next, we have Transactional Value which Jesse describes thus:
3/ "The transactional value would be the value that comes from the fact that there's this network of confidence in the market, that people have been doing this for hundreds of years and we know that when you wake up tomorrow, the S&P is not going to be at 500.
I'm delighted to introduce you to my newest colleague at Infinite Loops: Vatsal Kaushik (@antilibrary_vk) who, in addition to being an incredibly talented man, demonstrates the emerging power of the Digital World
2/ Time, Space and Geography are collapsing--Vatsal lives in Bangalore, India, but that no longer matters in the digital world.
We've already established an easy working relationship via text, emails and Zooms. Yesterday, I marveled this would have been impossible just a
3/ few years ago, but one of the positives of the global lockdown is it accelerated trends that might have taken years absent our need to adapte.
It's now clear to me that geography no longer matters--if you have access to high speed Internet,
2/ For much of human history, when someone wanted to figure out *why* something was the way it was, they often heard the same answer “The Gods did it.”
@DavidDeutschOxf, in his seminal book “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Change the World” argues that’s
3/ why humans made so little progress over much of unrecorded and recorded history. Generation after generation were born, lived and died under the same “rules” and bad explanations such that one could conceivably be born 200 years after a great, great-grandfather and yet
1/ My thesis that by externalizing our thoughts by writing them out, we:
~Understand if we understand or not (writing is a forcing mechanism);
~Quickly see holes or problems in our ideas that we wouldn't grasp if they just remained in our thoughts;
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~Externalize our thinking in time such that our minds can't helpfully "update" our memories to make them consistent with what we know and think now (hindsight bias);
~Help us understand WHY we were thinking things at the time and remind us that our "memories" are unreliable
3/ narrators. There's nothing quite as shocking as truly thinking you thought something during some event and then being called a liar in your own handwriting.
This is vital for correcting our errors and updating our mental models. I simply can't think of any other easy activity
2/ Edward Harriman, a railroad baron and stock speculator, had a keen understanding of the power of human emotions in pricing a stock.
Asked if he could sell Southern Pacific, then trading at $70 a share for $80 per share, he answered: No, but he *could* move the price
3/ of the stock UP to $150 per share and then sell it DOWN to $100 per share.
When asked why, he said that a $10 move in the share price wasn't big enough to ignite the imaginations of stock investors, but that an $80 spurt in the price would capture everyone's attention