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January 17 - February 28, 2022
People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions.
People can detect the difference between front- and back-office operators.
action without talk supersedes talk without action.
Bildungsphilisters—educated philistines.
sophistry.
Consider that about 10 percent of Americans will spend at least a year in the top 1 percent, and more than half of all Americans will spend a year in the top 10 percent.*3 This is visibly not the same for the more static—but nominally more equal—Europe. For instance, only 10 percent of the wealthiest five hundred American people or dynasties were so thirty years ago; more than 60 percent on the French list are heirs and a third of the richest Europeans were the richest centuries ago. In Florence, it was just revealed that things are even worse: the same handful of families have kept the wealth
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Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
Effectively Lindy answers the age-old meta-questions: Who will judge the expert? Who will guard the guard? (Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) Who will judge the judges? Well, survival will. For time operates through skin in the game. Things that have survived are hinting to us ex post that they have some robustness—conditional on their being exposed to harm. For 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.
Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.
Nietzsche: Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule.
Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
Simply, the minute one is judged by others rather than by reality, things become warped as follows.
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
Silent evidence should be the driver. Reading a history book, without putting its events in perspective, offers a similar bias to reading an account of life in New York seen from an emergency room at Bellevue Hospital.
mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words.
we libertarians share a minimal set of beliefs, the central one being to substitute the rule of law for the rule of authority.
