Professor M

2021-02-12 13:19:02 — Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers, I realize they think those poems are me. They are not me, even if I speak in the “I” person. They were my thoughts and my hand and the space and the emotions at that time of writing. Watch yourself. Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us.

— The most important thing I’ve learned through writing is that thoughts are not real, they’re not solid. That we pay too much attention to them. That there’s tremendous freedom in letting go of them. But that’s easier said than done, because thoughts connect with emotions and you hook up a story and a past and memories, and in three minutes you’re psychotic. But if you can catch them at the root, at the simple level of the thought first arising, it’s very helpful.

Writing Down the Bones | Natalie Goldberg

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2021-02-09 00:29:59 Man versus Machine — Part 3

The cover photo contains the clue of a theme repeatedly discussed in this blog: Know what you are selling (or buying).

I did not purchase just a warm and fuzzy hand-woven scarf. The scarf came in a bundle with a warm and fuzzy emotion. This feeling ignites when forming a bond with a person and their family. It flares up when making an (even small) difference in their children’s future.

The supply-side feelings also matter. When a craftswoman weaves a scarf using traditional methods, she’s part of a centuries-old tradition. She’s connected to her roots. The process itself is meaningful. She is not just earning a living; she is living.

Show me a machine that can manufacture this product!

Hand-weaving doesn’t waste scarce resources. It uses more resources per scarf because each scarf comes bundled with feelings. As long as humans aren’t machines, feelings are at least as important as scarves.

Man versus Machine — Part 1
Man versus Machine — Part 2 Open / Comment

2021-02-04 10:56:02 — “Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”

— His brand of empathy is unique. He seems to feel for the human species as a whole without always wanting to consider the wants and needs of individuals.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Ashlee Vance | Amazon

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2021-01-30 23:40:07 Man versus Machine — Part 2

Why did I think it was wrong to buy an overpriced hand-woven scarf instead of a cheaper machine-made one?

I contributed to the misallocation of resources. Machine-made scarfs are cheaper because machine production employs fewer resources per unit of output. My purchase of a hand-woven scarf diverted resources from efficient use to inefficient use.

The fact that this was a one-off transaction and not a repeated behavior did little to ease my pain. For this, I had to thank Kant’s Categorical Imperative. What if everyone ditched machine-made products in favor of hand-made ones? Society would waste so many resources that we’d go back to living in caves.

Yeah, but if everyone did this and you didn’t, the outcome would still be the same. So you shouldn’t lose sleep over chipping in. Right...? No...

When stoning people to death, no individual stone-thrower is directly responsible for the outcome either. However, I struggle to find an appropriately negative epithet to describe someone who’d choose to hurl a stone at an innocent person: “They would have died anyway; I might as well practice my aim.”

So was I stoning the economy? Or did I get stoned myself on way too much coca tea in Peru?

Part 3 will conclude.

Man versus Machine — Part 1 Open / Comment

2021-01-22 20:42:02 Man versus Machine — Part 1

Join me on a tour of memories about Peru, where I sat foot for a vacation a few years ago. Lima, Cusco, the Sacred Valley, and Machu Picchu, to name just a few places. That’s all wonderful. But let me share with you something that has truly (with only a touch of exaggeration) made an impression.

Until recently, my brain allocated at least some nodes in its parallel computing infrastructure toward piecing together the following puzzle.

Early in the trip, I purchased a hand-woven scarf from a family who produced it. (I visited their home as part of the hiking tour that day.) Why did I buy it?

Attractive price-to-quality ratio? No. The scarf was expensive; its quality was not great. I could have purchased a cheaper and better machine-made scarf of a similar design.

Okay, maybe I should have bargained harder. But it’s not the point. Overpaying is not a big issue: It’s just a transfer of resources from one person to another.

Part 2 will explain a bigger sin I grappled with. Open / Comment

2021-01-17 08:11:01 — For certain customers, a very good price is offered on a car, perhaps as much as four hundred dollars below competitors’ prices. The good deal, however, is not genuine; the dealer never intends it to go through. Its only purpose is to cause a prospect to decide to buy one of the dealership’s cars. Once the decision is made, a number of activities develop the customer’s sense of personal commitment to the car—a raft of purchase forms are filled out, extensive financing terms are arranged, sometimes the customer is encouraged to drive the car for a day before signing the contract “so you can get the feel of it and show it around in the neighborhood and at work.” During this time, the dealer knows, customers automatically develop a range of new reasons to support the choice they have now made.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Robert B. Cialdini | Amazon

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2021-01-14 09:32:00 ​​Telegram channels are a black box

Using a coin toss to determine whether to post an entry helped me to peek inside the black box that a telegram channel is. In particular, I got a better grasp of the forces affecting the number of subscribers.

The number of subscribers would consistently drop after a new post. Why? The count responds to two processes: (1) the inflow of new subscribers and (2) the outflow of existing subscribers.

Unless someone immediately shares your new entry, it does not affect the inflow of new subscribers. However, a new entry reminds existing subscribers about the channel’s existence. As such, if the post is not in line with what they want, they may choose to unsubscribe. In the absence of new entries, they would have stuck around for longer. (But, as a party host, do you want guests who don’t enjoy being there?)

This dynamic almost obeys the laws of physics. When you boil water, it’s a given that the number of H20 molecules in the pot at the end of the process would be lower.

But the boiling analogy is not as rich. Boiling drops the number of water molecules in the short term and the long term. New entries reduce the number of subscribers in the short term—but in the long term, they have a shot of bringing in new subscribers. In fact, it is impossible to have reliable growth in the long term without risking losses in the short term.

No pain, no gain. Open / Comment

2021-01-08 10:02:02 — Previous accomplishments and what you have today bear little relationship to real value. Finance is completely and ruthlessly forward-looking. The only source of value today is the future. The first step of valuation is to look forward and project what a company or investment will produce in the future.

— Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

— To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control... And I think that says something very important about the condition of the ethical life. That it is based on a trust in the uncertain, a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return. Mihir Desai | Amazon

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2021-01-04 07:30:04 Everything is a black box

“A black box is a device, system, or object viewable in terms of its inputs and outputs, without any knowledge of its internal workings.”

The world is nothing but an infinite collection of nested black boxes. The output of Black Box A becomes an input for Black Box B, which, in turn, has its output fed into Black Box C. This goes on forever. It’s black boxes all the way up.

Scientists choose a black box to focus on and try to peek inside it to understand the underlying causal relations between inputs and outputs. What for? If you know how a black box works, you can manipulate its output by adjusting the input you feed into it.

But it’s not just scientists who do this. All sentient beings are in the business of figuring out the optimal inputs to achieve the desired outputs given the set of black boxes available to them.

And this doesn’t have to be—literally—business. Peeking inside a black box is a fun hobby, too. Open / Comment

2020-12-31 12:01:04 — In the forty-four-year period between 1969 and 2013, Woody Allen wrote and directed forty-four films that received twenty-three Academy Award nominations—an absurd rate of artistic productivity. Throughout this period, Allen never owned a computer, instead completing all his writing, free from electronic distraction, on a German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter.

— “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time… there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.” (Neal Stephenson)

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Cal Newport | Amazon

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