Matthew Royal > Recent Status Updates

"If we expect to find the world divided into the deterministic contours of the possible and the impossible, with little room in between, we will wind up with overconfident predictions on the one hand, or unknown unknowns on the other."

"In science, one rarely sees all the data point toward one precise conclusion. Real data is noisy--even if the theory is perfect, the strength of the signal will vary. And under Bayes's theorem, no theory is perfect. Rather, it is a work in progress, always subject to further refinement and testing. This is what scientific skepticism is all about."

"I could feel a wooden door inside of me close. I had learned on the farm that I could stop loving animals raised for slaughter. And I could start loving them immediately when someone said, "This one is a pet," freeing me and opening the door."

"My aunt could not have been the lone romantic who gave up everything for sex. Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family."

"In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to."

"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it --our life-- hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly."

What Odean found was that overconfidence alone was enough to upset an otherwise rational market. Markets with overconfident traders will produce extremely high trading volumes, increased volatility, strange correlations in stock prices from day to day, and below-average returns for active traders--all the things that we observe in the real world.

"A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most disspiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille's side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back of Good Housekeeping."

Anna is wigging out! Having arguments with an imaginary version of Vronsky that says mean things to her. I think this is the ultimate fear a man has in a relationship. It's stressing me out, for sure. A lot of the crossed wire plot devices, where messages take too long to arrive, or arrive out of order, aren't really relevant today. They feel tedious and unnecessary rather than inevitable, as I believe is intended.

"Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay. She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a train or a bus station."

"He doesn't know the crow language. They don't like him out there. Eventually he came down to me, because I was out there. They would have killed him." "That's what comes of being hand-raised," said Faunia. "That's what comes of hanging around all his life with people like us. The Human Stain."

"Isn't this what the mafia does? You give somebody something they can't talk about. Then you've got them." "You involve them in a mutual transgression, and you have a mutual corruption."

"Every mistake that a man can make usually has a sexual accelerator."

"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."

"...the pleasure of being conventional unconventionally"

Read detached deck plan. Not bad, it leaves a bit to your imagination with stuff you have to figure out as a first time builder. The design is OK, but not something I'd especially want to have.

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It's more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it.

"The more he'd done nothing, the less time he had for anything."

Silver's suggestion to include conditional probabilities into high school Science should start with this chapter as required reading.

"Successful gamplers--and successful forecasters of any kind--do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence."

"Most statistical models are built on the notion that there are independent variables and dependent variables, inputs and outputs, and they can be kept pretty much separate from one another. When it comes to the economy, they are all lumped together in one hot mess"

At turns charming and shocking, David Sedaris delivers a volume of fanciful short stories about animals. Definitely not about his personal experiences or himself. :)