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"For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs.

Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous -- and it is also essential."

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

…in activities where luck plays a strong role, the focus must be on process. Where skill dominates, performance is a dependable barometer of progress. But where luck is a stronger force, the link between process and outcome is broken. A good process can lead to a bad outcome some percentage of the time, and a bad process can lead to a good outcome. Since a good process offers the highest probability of a good outcome over time, the emphasis has to be on process.

Michael Mauboussin writes in The Success Equation

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence" - William Kingdon Clifford.

Speeding up a video may make it more understandable instead of less.

I was listening to a video lecture at normal speed, and proceeded to get distracted and day-dreaming.

Then I remembered how NN Taleb in Antifragile once said the same thing, that maybe making himself less understandable to the audience, maybe by speaking very softly, he would be able to get them to pay more attention, i.e. achieving the opposite effect.

So then I sped by my video to 1.25x speed and immediately felt that I paid it a lot more attention than I would have otherwise.

The irony of the whole thing is - I paused the video to write this down, lest I forget it :)

Back to the lecture now.

#antifragile

Some businesses love their own mistakes. Reinsurance companies, who focus on insuring catastrophic risks (and are used by insurance companies to "re-insure" such non-diversifiable risks), manage to do well after a calamity or tail event that causes them to take a hit. If they are still in business and "have their powder dry" (few manage to have plans for such contingency), they make it up by disproportionately raising premia -- customers overreact and pay up for insurance. They claim to have no idea about fair value, that is, proper pricing, for reinsurance, but they know it is overpriced at times of stress, which is sufficient to them to make a long-term shekel. All they need is to keep their mistake small enough so that they can survive them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragility p73

But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragility p45-46

itscolossal

Banksy Painting Spontaneously Shreds Moments After Selling for $1.3 Million at Sotheby’s

buzzfeed

18 Jokes That Only Bilinguals Can Relate To On A Personal Level

Further, redundancy is not necessarily wussy; it can be extremely aggressive. For instance, if you have extra inventory of, say, fertilizers in the warehouse, just to be safe, and there happens to be a shortage because of disruptions in China, you can sell the excess inventory at a huge premium. Or if you have extra oil reserves, you must sell them at a large profit during a squeeze.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragility p45

Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragility p38

"Praise by name, criticize by category"

Warren Buffett

Confronted with the challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

A moment is optimal when an opponent is committed but not fully supported. In swordwork, this would be the moment when your partner has begun to execute a cut and is so far into it that they can’t pull it back. They have committed the sword and their body to the attack. If you merely evade, they will finish and their body will return to a stable condition as both feet settle back on the ground and the sword stops moving. In grappling an example happens every time someone takes a step. Every step involves transferring your weight forward onto a foot that then touches the ground. You have to transfer the weight before the foot is on the ground though. This creates an instant when your weight is committed but not supported. If something happens in that instant, you can’t pull it back or move it further forward easily or smoothly.

https://budobum.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-most-essential-principles-in-budo.html

Finding the really outstanding companies and staying with them through all the fluctuations of a gyrating market proved far more profitable to far more people than did the more colorful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear.

Phil Fisher - Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

Luckily, Git is so frustratingly incomprehensible that is has spawned a cottage industry of GUI systems and editor plugins that sit on top of Git and make it easier to use.

Ibid

As stated in books such as The Goal (by E.M. Goldratt, 1984) and The Phoenix Project (by G. Kim etc al., 2013), it is best only to expend effort directly at the bottleneck; improvements upstream of the bottleneck simply create a bigger backlog; improvements downstream of the bottleneck are premature optimizations.

GitOps: A Path to More Self-Service IT. CACM 9/2018

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