Revisiting my media consumption habits

Top Podcasts:
Serial (Season 2 isn't the best, but still an incredible master class in investigative journalism)
Tim Ferris show(great interviews in general)
Planet Money(short and crips - always)

Some that listen to here and there:
Reply All
Startup
Radiolab
99% invisible
Energy Gang
Criminal
Ted Radio Hour

Stuff that I've completely cut out:
Live markets news/WSJ/Bloomberg Live

Stuff partially cut out:

Economist(I read it cover to cover for years, but still a little negative; still read the technology/science/International segments)
FT Alphaville(too addictive to stop reading)

Value investing:
valueinvestingworld.com
Slack access to Manual of ideas
valuewalk.com
hurricanecapital
punchcardblog

You are not good at investing[google talks]

Searching for Alpha[Milken Institute Video]

Leaders on Leadership[including Howard Marks]

Larry Fink on Charlie Rose[video]

Value Investing + Keynes [video]

Charlie Munger: Human Misjudgement[audio]

Lessons from a dozen years of short selling[scribd]

Lessons From a Dozen Years of Short Selling-Whitney Tilson-12!4!13 by ValueWalk.com

Value Investing Video Links

Tepper Is Bullish On Airlines; Bearish On J.C. Penney, Treasuries http://bit.ly/18wMF7V
Pine River's Kuhn On Progressive Short Call [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/18wMIAx
Nehal Chopra, Tiger Ratan Capital Founder At Robin Hood http://bit.ly/18wO0vq
Alex Sacerdote At Robin Hood On Alibaba Long Case http://bit.ly/18Z7VzA
Stan Druckenmiller Full Bloomberg Interview From Robin Hood http://bit.ly/18wO3au
Larry Robbins: Stocks Wont Dip Until We Get Real Inflation http://bit.ly/18wO52j
Ackman on HLF, FNMA, FMCC, JCP [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/18wO5PA
Mario Gabelli: These Stocks Will Double In Five Years http://bit.ly/18wO4va
Philippe Laffont: Not in Internet Bubble [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/18Z83Pt
HVF CEO: What Is a Disruptive Innovator? http://bit.ly/18wOamq

Ray Dalio @ Dealbook conference

Kyle Bass Interview

Taleb and Kahneman discuss antifragility

The success eqution: Interview Transcript

Interview 8 Michael Mauboussin The Success Equation Untangling Skill and Luck in Business Sports and Invest... by Miguel Barbosa at SimoleonSense.com

A Financial History of the world

Anti-fragility

If you haven't heard about it already, Taleb, the guy behind the Black Swan theory(or as they claim) is out with another book. Although I wasn't intending on buying the book initially, his Saturday essay (WSJ) was what finally convinced me. Then of course Felix Salmon came out with a review along with Matt Ridley , and I just couldn't wait for it to come in.

Although I haven't really read the entire thing(there's some deep stuff which deserves more than a quick read), here are some quick points :

• Taleb's attitude towards uncertainty can be summarized as - Randomness and uncertainty, you want to use them and not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. The mission is to domesticate, dominate, and conquer the opaque, the unique and the uncertain. But how?
• Anti-fragile is beyond resilient. The resilient merely resists the shocks and stays the same, the anti-fragile become stronger.
  Taleb uses the example of the mythical creature Hydra, 'you cut the head of a Hydra and two grow out. That's anti-fragility right there.'
• The anti-fragile loves randomness and uncertainty, and more crucially, loves errors. In fact, we are most better at what we do because of anti-fragility. Taleb says that - he'd rather be dumb and anti-fragile than smart and fragile.'
• His stance on risk is essentially the same as always and he goes on to mention that-"its far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of probability of it being fragile. Anything that has more upside that downside from random events is what is anti-fragile; the reverse is fragile."
• Just like spending a month in bed would lead to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed when deprived of stressors. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
• But some become anti-fragile at the risk of others, and such anti-fragility is hidden. While in the past, those who took the risk were liable for their actions, today the opposite is prominent. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of heroes who are members of I.A.N.D.(International Association of Name Droppers). They game the system and the citizens pay the price. (Moral Hazard perhaps?)
• Most of history has been written because of Black Swan events. Such events hijack our brains because they are un-explainable. We don't realize the role of these events because of an illusion of predictability. Because of our fears and our thirst for order, we tend to be harmed by such events rather than benefit from them.
• Man-made complex systems eliminate predictability and cause out-sized events, so the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but paradoxically, it makes things a lot more predictable.
• We know a lot less about hundred-year floods than five-year floods, but every time we see a hundred-year flood, we throw it out and call it an outlier instead of learning from it.
• Mother nature is the best expert at rare events, and the best manager of Black Swans. It has succeeded to in getting here without Ivey League educated instructions. Anti-fragility is not just an antidote to Black Swans; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting such events.
• The anti-fragile gains from errors in prediction. Things that gain from randomness should dominate the world, everything else should be gone. But somehow, we live in this world under the illusion that everything works under rules, an illusion labeled as 'lecturing birds on how to fly.'
• Taleb's hate for complexity is quite prominent as well, and he mentions that complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects. Because of the opacity, an intervention leads to unforeseen consequences. He mentions that simplicity is difficult to implement; or like Steve Jobs would have said-"you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."
• Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But the main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, and thus is susceptible to be fooled of their simplicity.
• The anti-fragile likes volatility and it also likes time. Why time? Because time is functionally similar to volatility. Its simply what a grandmother calls experience.
• Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. Fragility is transferable, thus the first ethical rule is: If you see fraud and don't say fraud, you're a fraud.
• Anti-fragility is desirable in general, but not always, as there are cases when anti-fragility is costly. Further, its hard to consider that robustness is always desirable, or as Nietzche said-"one can die from being immortal. "


Although the book seems like a good mix of philosophy, history and finance so far, it does have its elements of humor. Taleb gives examples of how he's allergic to bankers and whenever there's one around, he can sense his irritation.
I'm sure this book is not for everyone, but for those who are looking for a Christmas downtime read, its definitely worth it.

Racism while job hunting?

I found this chart (from OKCupid, a supposedly popular online dating site)quite interesting to feed my data-science soul. It basically comes to the conclusion that as far as online-dating goes, racism is prominent and whatever you say, a sample size of 750K diverse people is representative in my books.

(Click on the chart for a link on further details about it)

 

But on a different note, a friend of mine recently asked me a very simple question, “If two candidates possess the same-skill, and one of them is a local and the other is foreign, would employers have a bias to pick the local over the foreign candidate?”

 

Now from an socio-economic standpoint, and from legal standpoint, the answer to that question is no. It is illegal to discriminate(at least in OECD countries) based on gender, sex, race or sexual orientation.

 

But I’m not going to talk about whether such biases occur or not, but instead focus on something else. If you ever find yourself facing a situation like this and start reverting to the answer-‘damn I probably didn’t get that job because I’m foreign’, then let me ask you this-‘is there any way possible for you to know that answer?’. The answer is a simple NO. If you didn’t get a job, it could have been because of a variety of reasons-poor skill set matching, poor interviewing, high competition, language barriers etc. What is critical to understand is that you will never know and that is all.

Whatever the reality be, considering that you can’t change the outcome makes it a fruitless effort to be concerned about and that time dwelling about it could be spent applying for other jobs.

If you can’t change the outcome of events, don’t bother being concerned about it, or as they say in French – ‘Nous ne pouvons pas nous échapper’, or more plainly in English, ‘we cannot escape ourselves’.

Myopia of groups

I’ve been taking French language lessons lately; not sure why, but I suppose I just like the idea of learning a European language. Besides, being trilingual would be quite smashing. But nonetheless, in a recent lecture, we were talking about meals and restaurants and someone brought up chopsticks.

I’m a sushi fanatic and I mastered chopsticks a very long time ago, and was very curious to learn what the french word would be for that. Turns out that the word is ‘baguette’. Now that actually makes sense since baguette in its true sense means a stick and when most people go visit a bakery and ask for a baguette, they are actually asking for a ‘french stick’.

But in North America, somehow a baguette has become synonymous with a french bread, thus everyone in the lecture was shocked to learn this and started questioning the fact, so as a repurcussion, the professor started thinking to herself that she might have made a mistake, but like always, she was correct. What she didn’t realize is that she had succumbed to popular delusions of the crowd. As is evident by history, the crowd tends to be wrong quite often(see here for a list of historical events).

Its not uncommon to become myopic in groups and become delusionsal and forget that perhaps what the crowd thinks is actually incorrect. Listening to the masses is always a good idea, but like a wise man once said- ‘Trust, but verify’.