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October 12, 2023
(Fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work, and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though your grandmothers’ wisdom doesn’t.)
You grandmother understand's society more than you
Zealand are halal. Close to 10 percent of Subway stores carry halal-only meat (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs of losing the business of ham eaters (like myself). The same holds in South Africa, which has about the same proportion of Muslims. There, a disproportionately high share of chicken is halal certified. But in the U.K. and other nominally Christian countries, halal is not neutral
They may hate McDonald’s, but they certainly hate uncertainty even more.
Uncertainty Is much more hated than bad service.
So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities. Simply, they violate the Silver Rule. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing suicide.
This is fucking scary
The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.
About the average
The psychological experiments on individuals showing “biases” do not allow us to automatically understand aggregates or collective behavior, nor do they enlighten us about the behavior of groups.
About individuals and groups
Understanding how the subparts of the brain (say, neurons) work will never allow us to understand how the brain works.
Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.
Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.
If you do the right on the top level.. The other will follow
In short, every organization wants a certain number of people associated with it to be deprived of a certain share of their freedom. How do you own these people? First, by conditioning and psychological manipulation; second, by tweaking them to have some skin in the game, forcing them to have something significant to lose if they disobey authority—something hard to do with gyrovague beggars who flout their scorn for material possessions. In the orders of the mafia, things are simple: made men (that is, ordained) can be whacked if the capo suspects a lack of allegiance, with a transitory stay
...more
“Never buy when you can rent the three Fs: what you Float, what you Fly, and what you…(that something else).”
Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
Risk takers can be socially unpredictable people.
And risk takers take risks because it is in their nature to be wild animals.
Ironically the highest status, that of a free man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.
Watching Putin made me realize that domesticated (and sterilized) animals don’t stand a chance against a wild predator. Not a single one. Fughedabout military capabilities: it is the trigger that counts.*6
People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.
this is not a decision that can be made by a collection of bureaucrats with a job description.
Difference beween startups and corporates
The academic tenure system is meant to give people the security to express their opinions freely. However, tenure is given (in the ideological disciplines, such as the “humanities” and social science) to the submissive ones who play the game and have shown proofs of such domestication. It’s not working.
To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.
To be free of conflict you need to have no friends.
The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden—just as Germans still pay for war crimes—would immediately add consequences to their actions.
The current narrative is that terrorists think they are going to heaven and will meet virgins that look like their next-door neighbors. Not quite true: many just seek a perceived heroic death, or to impress their friends. The desire to be a hero can be quite blinding.
Scars signal skin in the game.
Before we end, take some Fat Tony wisdom: always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action.
The more inequality in the system, the more the winner-take-all effect, the more we depart from the methods of thin-tailed Mediocristan (see Glossary) in which economists were trained. The wealth process is dominated by winner-take-all effects. Any form of control of the wealth process—typically instigated by bureaucrats—tends to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution is to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that works best in the United States.
Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
Now, crucially, time is equivalent to disorder, and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously call survival, is the ability to handle disorder.
without skin in the game, via exposure to reality, the mechanism of fragility is disrupted: things may survive for no reason for a while, at some scale, then ultimately collapse, causing a lot of collateral harm.
“The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether it made sense but whether it worked,” which is why, while dedicating this book, I called Ron Paul a Roman among Greeks.
Life is about peer assessment.”
You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
Being reviewed or assessed by others matters if and only if one is subjected to the judgment of future—not just present—others.
And recall that, a free person does not need to win arguments—just win.
Winning
But if you create a collection of, say, twenty people who set up an academy and say crazy things accepted by the collective, you now have “peer-reviewing” and can start a department in a university.
Anything that smacks of competition destroys knowledge.
