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December 16 - December 22, 2017
Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don’t formally understand anything.
A philosopher uses logic without statistics, an economist uses statistics without logic, a physicist uses both.
It is perplexing but amusing to observe people getting extremely excited about things you don’t care about; it is sinister to watch them ignore things you believe are fundamental.
Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
Be consciously ignorant. This is the way to learn.
For the classics, philosophical insight
was the product of a life of leisure; for us, a life of leisure can be the product of philosophical insight.
For many people, it takes a lot of preparation to learn to become ordinary. It takes a lot of intellect and confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.
Saying “the mathematics of uncertainty” is like saying “the chastity of sex”—what is mathematized is no longer uncertain, and vice versa.
If your approach to mathematics is mechanical not mystical, you’re not going to go anywhere.
Sadly, we learn the most from fools, economists, and other reverse role models, yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude.
ECONOMIC LIFE AND OTHER VERY VULGAR SUBJECTS
There are designations, like “economist,” “prostitute,” or “consultant,” for which additional characterization doesn’t add information.
A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem.
Financial inequalities are ephemeral, one crash away from reallocation; inequalities of status are there to stay.
What they call “risk” I call opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call sucker problem.
If you detect a repressed smile on the salesperson’s face, you paid too much for it.
Organizations are like caffeinated dupes unknowingly jogging backward; you only hear of the few who reach their destination.
There are three types of large corporations: those about to go bankrupt, those that are bankrupt and hide it, those that are bankrupt and don’t know it.
The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
The left holds that because markets are stupid models should be smart; the right believes that because models are stupid markets should be smart. Alas, it never hit both sides that both markets and models are very stupid.
When positive, show net; when negative, show gross.
Economics is like a dead star that still seems to produce light; but you know it is dead.
A trader listened to the firm’s “chief” economist’s predictions about gold, then lost a bundle. The trader was asked to leave the firm. He then angrily asked the boss who was firing him, “Why do you fire me alone, not
the economist? He too is responsible for the loss.” The boss: “You idiot, we are not firing you for losing money—we are firing you for listening to the economist.”
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
You can be certain that the head of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that “there is nothing to worry about.”
Economics is about making simple things more complicated, mathematics about making complicated things simpler.
The stock market, in brief: participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is for a Broadway show.
What makes us fragile is that institutions cannot have the same virtues (honor, truthfulness, courage, loyalty, tenacity) as individuals.
😀😀❤️❤️❤️😝🎙🎙🎙🎙
The worst damage has been caused by competent people trying to do good; the best improvements have been brought by incompetent ones not trying to do good.
Saying someone is good at making profits but not good at managing risk is like saying someone is a great surgeon except for cases when the patients die.
The difference between banks and the Mafia: banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.
“It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions.”*1
Being an entrepreneur is an existential not just a financial thing.
At a panel in Moscow, I watched an economist who got the “Nobel” for writings no one reads, theories no one uses, and lectures no one understands.
Anyone who likes meetings should be banned from attending meetings.
One of the failures of “scientific approximation” in the nonlinear domain comes from the inconvenient fact that the average of expectations is different from the expectation of averages.*2
An economist is a mixture of 1) a businessman without common sense, 2) a physicist without brains, and 3) a speculator without balls.
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the
practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.
😁😁😁😁
Those with brains and no balls become mathematicians, those with balls and no brains join the Mafia, those with no balls and no brains become economists.
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.
Fate is at its cruelest when a banker ends up in poverty.
