#because it's not subject to survivorship bias as much

[marzipanandminutiae]

Yknow sometimes I think about collecting more antique clothing to wear but then I remember that I'm 5'10" and ladies weren't that tall back then

Oh, they were! Just fewer of them (throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, average height fluctuated as low as 2" below the modern average, or as close to it as no difference at all). And their clothing is less likely to survive, because larger or longer garments could be more easily cut down to make clothing for smaller relatives and/or children. That's called "survivorship bias," and in clothing history, it's the reason small clothes tend to be overrepresented in museums. There are other factors, like formal milestones for which clothing might be a significant memento happening mostly early in life, when you're at your smallest adult size, but that's the most relevant one to your situation.

Also, don't feel too bad- a lot of antique clothing isn't wearable for not immediately obvious reasons. From concerns about silk "shattering," a form of damage that's literally unrepairable, to iron mordants in black dye making black garments fall apart faster over time, your best bet re: wearing antiques is to stick to things like undergarments and maybe blouses and outerwear. Sad but true.

[astrobei]

This is kind of an odd question, but since you seem to have done it very successfully and I have no clue: How do you make friends online?

I always see people on here talking about their mutuals and about their online friends, and some of that’s def survivorship bias, but I’m guessing I’m not alone in having no clue how to get from recognizing someone’s username to having them be a person I would talk to about a bad day?

Anyway, this continues to be a weird ask so answer it any way you want and no worries if it takes a while, but yeah, with all the posts about you and haven meeting up I am just looking for advice on *how*

Ty so much!

hi hi hi hello!! i’ve actually gotten asks like this before and i’m so sorry 2 everyone who’s sent one bc i’m afraid i don’t have a super concise or helpful way to answer this,,, (but i’ll still try lol)

to be so so honest with you, i got super lucky because i was introduced to a lot of my friends in this fandom through group chats or mutuals’ discord servers that other people have added me to, which i know is kind of a lame answer because being added to gcs/others’ servers is not exactly something u can control … but you are so right in saying that you’re not alone in feeling like this !! i know so many people feel intimidated by the idea of making friends on here especially since there Are so many users i associate as groups and it seems like everyone has Those Friends (me included, i’ll admit) and it’s probably easier said than done because i did get lucky enough to meet a lot of my now-close friends rn through ao3/comments/writers’ gcs way back in the summer or fall 😗 it also definitely takes time to get close to someone in this way, and these friendships are not something that happened overnight, even for me !! i feel like it’s easy to get stressed out by the potential of every new mutual/friend you make being The Friend and that can put a lot of pressure on both you and the other person to be super compatible right off the bat, so on and so forth, which isn’t fair and will probably lead to more disappointment than anything, so i think it’s important to remember that (almost?) no solid friendship goes from 0-100 overnight and it takes time to build trust and emotional connection with anyone!

so i would say . basically . if you’ve stayed this long and all of this rambling that my biggest pieces of advice would be:

1. fr and honestly just go for it. like you said, i know so many people feel the exact same way as you do, so send that mutual you admire an ask or a dm!! every friendship has got to start somewhere so if you see them rb an ask game maybe send something nice or maybe if you see a post that reminds u of them send it to them ! i’ve made a couple of my closest friends because we sent each other asks a lot before moving to dms -> other platforms, or people have just dm’d me directly out of the blue and i was surprised by how well we clicked !! these are maybe lame examples but. u get the idea lol. Just Do It i believe in u 🥳

2. be patient !! i know i already said it before but close friendships, like the ones you’re talking about, rarely happen overnight. even with people i’ve felt a connection with immediately, it’s taken some time for us to really get comfortable with each other and past that awkward stage so it’ll likely take some dedication and commitment to communication on both your parts! something i would like to emphasize: don’t make friends purely out of strong expectations of being Best Friends because, again, this could lead to a lot of disappointment when someone doesn’t live up to expectations you’ve created In Your Head. find people you really click with and genuinely enjoy talking to, and maybe see eventually if they’d want to move from talking through asks to dms to discord/text!

ummmm. i think that’s all i have to say on the topic, hopefully this wasn’t too disappointing to read because again, i’m not too sure how to organize my thoughts on the subject LOL but i’m wishing you all the best and i’m promising u that almost everyone in this community feels the same way !! make the first move/respond when someone maybe makes the first move to you + take it slow + be kind and patient and you will have friends lining up in ur dms to talk to u 🫡much much love !! 🫶🏽

[briarpatch-kids]

this ask got away from me so 1, i just want to clarify i'm agreeing with you, and 2 i understand if you don't post it lol.

i have had someone try to Gotcha me by asking how i'm alive by now if i'm really too disabled to work. i told them i had support growing up or i'd be dead lol like i don't know what they expected. survivorship bias is wild.

Like. If you are relatively low support needs, yes you can absolutely still suffer from a lack of money/insurance or have parents who don't care or are working so much they don't have time to act etc, and you end up undiagnosed and untreated into your adulthood. That sucks! It does!

But if you're a HIGH support needs person in that same position, either you catch the notice of a public school teacher or something and get access to free or cheap resources, or you are much less likely to MAKE IT to adulthood.

so we end up with this weird crossroads of relatively low support needs people (i'm not up on terminology i apologize) getting diagnosed as adults, and some of them turning around and resenting higher support needs people with early diagnoses, and assuming they've led some kind of charmed life.

but like. no i don't actually think my childhood friend with a more visible disability than me is "privileged" over ME because she had a school-funded aide for a few years and was subjected to our shitty town's probably traumatizing special ed system. i didn't get diagnosed because my parents were oblivious and i was able to mask, and that ability is a privilege i'm VERY aware of because early diagnosis of my ND issues against my will specifically would have HURT me.

it frustrates me because i experience kind of the other version of this with my physical disabilities. i was visibly not okay most of the time, but i lived in the middle of nowhere with no infrastructure for complex medical issues. most of my shit didn't get diagnosed or treated until my twenties and some of it STILL isn't, and that has done lasting harm to my body and brain. and i'm still one of the fucking lucky ones. if i had my same support needs but grew up as poor as i am now, i'd be dead.

so like, am i MORE or LESS privileged than a poorer person living in a bigger city who got diagnosed young but didn't need the supports and just got the stigma? or a rich person who can buy their own adaptive tech but has such a rare and severe case that they still have no diagnosis and are constantly playing a guessing game about what will help and what will make things worse? it's meaningless. privilege is an element of our lives not a label to slap on and call it a day

I feel you, I'm a similar situation to you where as a kid I needed support and didn't get it but could kinda get by, and yeah it sucked but like... I'm still here and while that's not quite a privilege it's certainly something that only happened because I'm lucky and I wouldn't trade "needs support or would die" for having support as a kid.

It's a privilege in the sense of like "don't be a dick to people who wouldn't have survived without supports because they got help" but people who struggled and could make it aren't "privileged" because a lot of times we barely made it and were at a disadvantage compared to our abled peers.

[songbirdspells]

Read Along: Ancient Greece A Political, Social and Cultural History by Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts. Long post, reminder that you can blacklist "songbird chirps" and/or "read along ancient greece book" to avoid these posts.

(Pg 2) "Though religion inspired much of architecture, literature, and even athletic competitions, which were held to honor the gods, Greek government and society often seemed to function in an entirely secular manner. Marriage, for example, was a purely civil affair, and divorce was not believed to distress the gods at all. The gods were nowhere and everywhere. Ideals of equality were preached by men who usually owned slaves and believed in the inferiority of women."

Thoughts: The quote "the gods were nowhere and everywhere" hits hard but no real use for it -Interesting that they list a lot of everyday aspects of life then say things are mostly secular. But makes sense in a way--humanity has remained roughly the same and some people make religion a part of every single thing and other people are the 'church on major holidays' sorts of people. Would like to see their source for this, though, as whether the original authors were religious or not seems to greatly affect their opinion. -The slave thing...yes. Noted a lot especially in literature about Athens life, Spartan life, agricultural, and mining operations. Just like now, philosophers tended to be wealthy men who ignored the people doing the actual labor. For some reason these authors then go on to quote those same slave-owning bastards with their hot takes on Greek labor with no caveats so that's fun.

(Pg 4-5) "Materials decay, and the soil of Greece is not good for preserving things. Accordingly, artifacts made of wood, cloth, and leather are rarely found. Metals fare better: gold and silver last almost forever; bronze is fairly durable, iron more subject to corrosion. Another material, virtually indestructible, is terra-cotta."

Thoughts: Survivorship bias is something to always be mindful of. Especially looking at what is surviving--it is all materials by and for rich people, who will not give us an accurate portrayal of day to day life of the Greeks, and will leave us holes in terms of every day worship practices. However, terra-cotta was extremely cheap and plentiful so possibly also explains the amount of surviving votive offerings with it.

(Pg 6) "The most common medium for writing in the ancient Mediterranean was papyrus"

Thoughts: rip people's grocery lists and burn books. But in seriousness, again, survivorship bias! We see such a small amount of how the majority lived and worshiped.

(Pg 9) "When all is said and done, what stands out about the Greeks is the great paradox: a single people, yet totally disunited and regularly at war with itself."

Thoughts: Why it's important to note geographical locations when speaking about rituals when possible. What happens in one polis may not happen in another. This is American-centric but it's very similar to how the states are set up. People from Alaska don't have much in common in day to day life with people from Iowa, but they're both American and statistically are going to hold similar religious beliefs. There is never going to be just one way to do things. Also explains the different holiday calendar due to differing climates and needs.

(Pg 15) "Water, the most precious natural resource, is scarce in Greece because there are very few rivers that flow year round, and few lakes, ponds, and springs"

Thoughts: Find that agricultural book again and look for references for wells. It could also explain the importance of libations above all offerings--they're giving a finite resource. Could also explain why even the gods give libations. One drought and I can promise everyone is religious as all get out. Also, remember the messages left at Zeus' temple and how snippy people got about the rain. It is likely connected, reference maps between those temples and location of rivers to ensure mental connection is correct.

[smokeys-bastard-children]

On starting wildfires

So I keep seeing a post about how starting a wildfire for a gender reveal is pretty dumb (which it is) so as someone who lives with wildfires every summer, I though I would share my two cents on fires.

1) yeah, a gender reveal bomb during peak fire season (especially after the same damn thing happened not too long ago) is dumb. Wildfires get started for all kinds of dumb reasons; Multnomah falls got torched after some kid was chucking fireworks into dry fuels. I've heard of fires stared by people parking their car in dry grass, people idling their car on dry grass, fires started by throwing away rags of linseed oil before they were dry, people burning an ex's love letters, people driving with brush caught in their undercarriage; no one intends to start a fire but that doesn't stop them once they get going.

2) yes, you can be held liable for the cost of containing a fire you start. No you are probably not going to pay it. When you hear about these astronomical fines after someone starts a wildfire, generally that's because fire management agencies want you to hear about it so hopefully you don't start the next one. Unless you are a power company or something similar, you are never going to actually pay the full cost. What it generally means is that the person responsible will have to pay a small portion of the fine (maybe a couple hundred dollars a month) for the rest of their lives. A painful reminder of that time you decided to do something stupid? Yes. Millions of dollars? No.

3) who caused a fire is a more complicated question than who caused the ignition. These destructive fires have a lot more to do with the conditions that have been created than the fact that they were started at all; the past century has seen massive fire suppression efforts and as a result fuel loads have built up to the point that suppressing further fires is incredibly difficult. There are some areas that I've been to that have more in common with a slash pile than a forest. Stories I've heard from a fairly recent, nasty fire include the fact that fire crews had to fight it road to road because there was too much downed wood to do anything else. As a result, any ignition source has the potential to spark a massive fire.

4) fires dictate forests and forests encourage fires. Fire ecology is a really interesting field and I would recommend anyone interested in fires to look into it. Suffice to say that every plant species (mainly talking about trees) has its own strategy for dealing with the fires it deals with. Ponderosa pines are adapted to frequent, low intensity fires, lodgepole pine forests are adapted to infrequent, high intensity fires. In turn, these forests encourage these fire regimes to a certain extent, such as lodgepole forests being prone to high severity fires that they can easily bounce back from. Heavy handed fire suppression efforts have thrown this out of wack causing high severity fires where forests are adapted to low severity fires and patches of juniper to be everywhere. This is why controlled burning and less draconian fire responses are being encouraged.

5) there are a lot more wildland fires than you think. In general, most people are only going to hear about large fires. These may happen a few times a season. I happen to listen to the radio frequencies that fires are called in on for my area and it isn't uncommon to hear a half dozen fires called in on a day following lightning.

6) home owners have a lot of influence on whether their house survives a fire. Now there are always factors that are out of your control, but if you live in the wildland urban interface fire preparedness needs to start a long time before smokes start popping up. For one, if a fire crew cannot safely defend an area, they will not defend that area. The presence of an open area at least nearby that a person could survive as the fire front passes is a make or break criteria for whether a fire crew will be anywhere near your house when a fire is threatening it. Beyond this you should maintain defensible space around your house, avoid flammable materials such as ceder shingles, avoid ember traps like attached wood decks, and buy into fire protection programs should they be available. Basically half of the features that make a regular appearance in cabin porn photos will do you zero favors in a fire. I would recommend doing your own research if you live in the wildland urban interface, and it's likely that your local forest service or dept. of forestry office can help you out.

7) this year I've been hearing a number of stories of homeowners remaining in the face of evacuation orders and successfully defending their home. I have mixed feelings about this, but one thing that I do know is that while success stories are picked up and interviewed, failure will just mean another tally mark in the "died after ignoring evacuation orders" column. Look up the definition of survivorship bias and engrave it on your heart.

8) wildland fire fighters are very different from structural firefighters. Structural fire fighters are renowned for their cooking, tend to accumulate qualifications like hoarders, usually act as emergency medical personal, and are frequently the subject of calenders. Wildland firefighters are known to eat basically whatever, are largely seasonal workers with minimal qualifications, act as an informal manual labor force in their downtime, and can be some of the grubbiest people you could ask for if they have been camping for a while.

9) convict crews are a thing. While prison labor itself is a full can of worms in its own right, I feel like it would be remiss not to point out the fact that the labor market can be fairly hostile to ex-cons and that an inmate fire crew position can act as a gateway to a private fire crew position if not a government one. While prison labor is far from a perfect institution, I feel that a crusade against a program which can provide a pathway to a fairly well paying job in the absence of any higher education does very little good without larger reforms aimed at allowing people who have served their time to re-enter the workforce.

10) wildfires aren't evil. If an area burns it will recover in time, particularly if the fire fits within the fire regime native to that area. While fire scars can be ugly, a forest that is suffering from a lack of fire is (imo) a far more depressing sight. After every high profile fire there are narratives that the area is destroyed; Yellowstone, Multnomah falls, ect. The forest is more than a bunch of trees that can get burnt and destroyed. Wildlands have cooexisted with fire since long before large scale fire suppression was possible and it is hubris to think that we can fully control them even if we wanted to.

Sorry for the long post, but fires are a big part of where I live and what I do. If there's a take home message here it's that you should follow the advice of your local fire management agencies and that fires and fire management are a lot more nuanced than you might think. Only you can prevent forest fires, but don't think that that means that fire isn't important to the landscape.

[amarantine-amirite]

It’s Your Funeral (No, Wait, It’s Her’s)

Breatharian: (n.) a person who believes that, through meditation, one can exist on air alone

Jane Bolton died. I know because I'm at her funeral, trying to write a speech that will fill up 8 to 10 minutes.

Why am I even trying to write any speech, much less one that fills up any amount of time? Well, my school's policy is that if a student dies during the school year, that their classmates from homeroom have to attend the funeral and give a 8 to 10 minute speech, which will be worth half your final grade in whatever the deceased's best subject is (which, in this case, would be history). My grade in history is not that good, so I better knock this speech out of the park.

Therein lies the problem: I have nothing to say. I didn't know Jane Bolton too well, so I have no idea what to say. I have to give a speech, and I’ve got nothing.

I waited around to hear what my peers had to say. It was darkly funny to hear them one-up each other in terms of their speeches. It started when Amara gave this speech about how everything would be so much better if everyone switched to veganism. Then, Heidi gave a speech about how it's immoral to eat plants because they are the only life forms that don't take from another to sustain themselves (or some other new age-y crap). 

It got worse as time wore on. I figured when it all came down to me, I would have to give a speech about breatharianism. It just felt so stupid to me. You cannot subsist on air, no matter how hard you meditate. The entire thing was just so stupid. So stupid it hurts.

After listening to a few other speeches, I figured I’d do something about survivorship bias. It was a great idea. Nobody else had given a speech about this. And it needs to be said more often that just because it “worked for you” doesn’t mean it will “work for me”, and thinking that way is survivorship bias in action. 

Case in point: warplanes. You need to armour your warplanes, but you can’t put armour everywhere (otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fly). How do you know where to put the armour? Well, have a look at where the planes were shot when they land. Easy, right?

Problem: what about the planes that didn’t make it back? Those planes that didn’t come back were probably shot in all the places that were left bare one the ones that did. Thus, war planes should be armoured where there aren’t bullet holes. It’s totally upside down. Bottom line is that any idea seems like a good one when you don’t talk about the failures.

Right now, Kenny is just starting his speech. Once he’s done, it’ll be my turn. I hope I get a good grade on this speech even though it’s more or less completely irrelevant. How is it irrelevant? We may never know.

@nightmarish-reverie-prompts

[bet-sinclair-blog]

information value in soccer betting

Information could change the way you bet and the results you get.  Knowing about something before anyone else is the key to successful betting. Instead of wasting time with soccer betting tips, smart bettors will collate as much information as possible, analyse the impact it could have on the market and then bet accordingly. Those who can get hold of accurate information and act on it before anyone else will reap the rewards - as soon as it is common knowledge, a bookmaker will have already made adjustments to the odds. Information doesn’t always provide you with a winning selection to bet on, but it will help you consistently beat the closing line - this means the smallest detail about how a team or individual might perform is crucial if you want to get the odds with the best value. Bettors have various sources of information - it could be anything from a digital feed to a contact with inside information. These sources can provide insight into team news, how a player is feeling or even more irregular occurrences like a team not wanting to play due to a pay dispute. Low margins and high limits are very important to bettors, but so too is the right kind of information. What’s wrong with soccer betting tips? While tipsters might have comprehensive knowledge of the sport they bet on, the advice they give is just a subjective opinion. A smart bettor, however, might get value out of Team B’s odds by betting on them the day before the match when they learn that Team A’s best player was injured in training. Everyone has access to some information about a certain sporting event, but being the first to know about something or being privy to information that no one else is aware of is what gives bettors an edge. Someone who provides soccer betting tips might predict that Team A will beat Team B because their head-to-head record favours Team A and Team B is on a poor run of form. Of course, some tipsters appear to have an impressive record and know what they’re doing but on closer inspection, things like luck and survivorship bias will play a part. Conversely, factual information is just that - a fact. Examples of how information benefits bettors Real Madrid vs. Deportivo La Coruna In this case, announcements made regarding Madrid’s starting line up in the pre-match press conference the day before the game had a major impact on the odds. While the majority of bettors would have learned of Zinedine Zidane’s intention to rest Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema during the press conference, some would have known about it beforehand. The same applies to the Handicap market of this game with Real Madrid moving from -2.75 at 2.050 to -1.75 at 1.917. Deportivo La Coruna game in La Liga. The shift in Bet-Sinclair odds shows just how important knowing about this kind of information could be. Bet-Sinclair Total Goals market initially opened as Under 4 goals at 1.962. One recent example of how getting hold of information before anyone else can be beneficial is the recent Real Madrid vs. After the news became common knowledge, Bet-Sinclair Total Goals market moved to Under 3 goals at 2.050 before closing at 1.917 for Under 3.25 goals. This highlights how two bettors could make two completely different bets on the same market - with one getting much better value for their bet because of the information they have and the timing of the bet. This price remained steady until a few hours before the aforementioned press conference. Barcelona vs. Malaga The Totals market also saw a similar shift - over 3.75 at 2.00 moved to over 3.25 at 1.92. Hypothetically speaking, if you placed a €100 bet on the draw in this game, the potential returns would have dropped from €955 to €768 within a half an hour window - emphasising just how important this kind of information can be. Regardless of the result, we can once again see how two bettors placing a bet on the same market could get a completely different set of odds dependant on when they made the bet. If Bettor A knew about Messi’s sickness before the bookmaker and reacted quickly enough, they would get much better value than Bettor B who might have bet too early or too late Another similar example of team news influencing betting odds is Barcelona’s match against Malaga in late 2016. However, during the warm-up before the game, it was reported that Lionel Messi had been sick in the player’s tunnel. Within half an hour of the news breaking, the odds on a Malaga win moved from 19.50 to 15.00, with the odds on the draw shortening from 9.55 to 7.68. On this occasion, the team’s had already been announced. The Handicap market moved by half a goal - Barcelona was -2.5 at 2.12 and moved to -2 at 2.08. What the soccer betting tips don’t know While this isn’t necessarily uncommon for a lower league side, only a select few were aware of how severe their struggles were. Following a 2-0 victory over Torquay, Weymouth lost 3-0 at home to Stevenage and played mid-table Rushden and Diamonds next. Although Rushden and Diamonds would have been a slight favourite going into the fixture, if everyone knew that Weymouth had to field its youth team because they hadn’t paid the first-team medical insurance bill, it would have dramatically changed the odds available. There are various other types of information, mostly concerning lesser-known teams, which can be even more beneficial in soccer betting. Back in February 2009, Conference Premier side Weymouth F.C were in financial turmoil. Weymouth lost the fixture 9-0. Kettering Town F.C is another example of a club’s finances influencing the outcome of a match. Although Kettering had lost two of their last four matches, it was only by a single goal. In October 2012, the Kettering players issued an ultimatum over unpaid wages - something that most bettors, and indeed bookmakers, were not aware of. Ahead of a Southern Premier League game at home to Bashley, only ten players in the Kettering squad had been paid and thus, they could only field ten players for the match - they lost the match 7-0. Getting hold of team news before anyone else is perhaps the most common type of information that bettors can use to get an edge. Anyone with knowledge of the pay dispute and ultimatum could have taken advantage of Bashley’s odds knowing that they had a considerable advantage. The difference between rumour and information The emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter means we now have access to more information than ever before. It might be a tipster trying to attract more interest to their website or a modern example of Chinese whispers, but the amount of false information available far outweighs that which is accurate and useful. It might pay to react to a “leak” of information before anyone else does, but it could also majorly backfire if that information turns out to be false or unfounded. It is important to use a reliable source that can be trusted to only provide valid information when betting large amounts of money. Additionally, we live in an age of soccer betting tips where everyone and anyone claims to have valuable information. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee in terms of how credible or reliable the source of this information actually is. Read the full article

[jkottke]

A cognitive bias cheat sheet

Cognitive biases are systematic ways in which people deviate from rationality in making judgements. Wikipedia maintains a list such biases and one example is survivorship bias, the tendency to focus on those things or people which succeed in an endeavor and discount the experiences of those which did not.

A commonly held opinion in many populations is that machinery, equipment, and goods manufactured in previous generations often is better built and lasts longer than similar contemporary items. (This perception is reflected in the common expression "They don't make 'em like they used to.") Again, because of the selective pressures of time and use, it is inevitable that only those items which were built to last will have survived into the present day. Therefore, most of the old machinery still seen functioning well in the present day must necessarily have been built to a standard of quality necessary to survive. All of the machinery, equipment, and goods that have failed over the intervening years are no longer visible to the general population as they have been junked, scrapped, recycled, or otherwise disposed of.

Buster Benson recently went through the list of biases and tried to simplify them into some sort of structure. What he came up with is a list of four conundrums -- "4 qualities of the universe that limit our own intelligence and the intelligence of every other person, collective, organism, machine, alien, or imaginable god" -- that lead to all biases. They are:

1. There's too much information. 2. There's not enough meaning. 3. There's not enough time and resources. 4. There's not enough memory.

The 2nd conundrum is that the process of turning raw information into something meaningful requires connecting the dots between the limited information that's made it to you and the catalog of mental models, beliefs, symbols, and associations that you've stored from previous experiences. Connecting dots is an imprecise and subjective process, resulting in a story that's a blend of new and old information. Your new stories are being built out of the bricks of your old stories, and so will always have a hint of past qualities and textures that may not have actually been there.

For each conundrum in Benson's scheme, there are categories of bias, 20 in all. For example, the categories that related to the "not enough meaning" conundrum are:

1. We find stories and patterns even in sparse data. 2. We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories whenever there are new specific instances or gaps in information. 3. We imagine things and people we're familiar with or fond of as better than things and people we aren't familiar with or fond of. 4. We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about. 5. We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future.

Benson's whole piece is worth a read, but if you spend too much time with it, you might become unable to function because you'll start to see cognitive biases everywhere.

[kadobeclothing]

Why Refusing to Discuss Failure Erodes a Culture of Growth

Have you ever sat in a meeting where a project was described as a success, yet all the details of failure that led to that success were left out? Alternatively, have you ever watched while data was cherry picked to make things seem rosier than they actually are? These are common embodiments of a very common, yet little known, phenomenon called “Success Theater”.

Success theater is, at its core, an informal operating system that says to employees: “you’re expected to win, and you should only discuss wins. Failures need not be exemplified.”

More concretely, success theater describes “the efforts that we make to make things look good, even if actual performance isn’t good or getting better.” Ultimately, it is an avoidance of data that conflicts with your opinions. It’s a fear of confronting failure or uncomfortable conversations and reflection. I like this definition (and the whole article) from John Cutler: “Success Theater is celebrating hitting the quarterly goal without acknowledging the corners you had to cut and the people who will have to clean up the mess. It’s listening to someone rattle off vanity metrics. And it’s being told you’re not a team player for having some doubts about a recent ‘win.’ … And it’s rampant in our internal meetings, blog posts, and presentations.” Success theater is … exactly what it sounds like it would be. Of course, in the real world, failure is going to happen. In fact, it needs to happen in order to succeed. Tons of value can come from documenting and sharing lessons from failed campaigns. Survivorship bias can warp the expectations of both leaders and new team members, and digging up your ‘graveyard of knowledge’ can help elicit new ideas and insights that could contribute to major breakthroughs in marketing and optimization. In general, it’s best we confront failure honestly, instead of hiding from it.

The Ruinous Path of Success Theater: GE’s Horror Story One of the most popular stories about success theater is a Wall Street Journal piece on General Electric. According to the story, former CEO Jeffrey Immelt was constantly optimistic in the face of future projections. In addition to his optimism and “can-do attitude,” he and his fellow top deputies also shielded themselves from any bad news or data that contradicted that narrative. Unfortunately, the results were catastrophic:

By 2018, the stock price had dropped by roughly 44%. In the same year, they announced they would cut their annual dividend for only the second time in their 125-year history. They also announced they were taking a $6.2 billion charge in their fourth quarter related to their insurance operations and needed to set aside $15 billion over seven years to bolster insurance reserves at the GE Capital unit. Finally, they had to restate their earnings for 2017 and 2016, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began investigating them for these accounting issues. Identifying and Diagnosing Success Theater GE is an extreme example of Success Theater starting at the top and trickling down, eventually taking over the company. But smaller and subtler versions of it could happen at your company. Liane Davey outlined some signs to look out for: Everything is an opportunity (If your organization finds creative ways to describe issues to obscure the real issues, worry) Every plan is a hockey stick (If your company is always predicting that next year will be the year it all comes together, you’ve got a problem) You hit the number at any cost (You know you’ve got a problem when you start taking short-term gains that create long-term pain) You shoot the messenger (If the harbingers of trouble can no longer be heard, you have a problem) Additionally, I’ve found a simpler sign — if you notice data cherry-picking and storytelling frequently (and on purpose), that’s a strong symptom of underlying success theater. Success theater can also show up in our industry-wide narratives. You can see it in the constant flurry of 315% conversion uplift case studies shared on Twitter, and at the top of GrowthHackers (and also, of course, in the glorious rise and tremendous fall of WeWork). How to Combat Success Theater There’s no silver-bullet solution to avoid success theater, and it will probably always exist to some degree. We just want to curb it to the point where it doesn’t poison productivity. I talked to several growth leaders and also wrote down my own favorite ways of combating success theater, which I’ll share now. 1. Write About and Share Failed Experiments Our team at HubSpot places a huge value on learning, and not just on reporting our wins week-over-week.

We keep a weekly calendar spot to write down our learnings for the week. We talk about those insights during Monday meetings. We’re all encouraged to write internal posts about failed campaigns — or even mediocre campaigns. We don’t want to build a graveyard of knowledge where we’re only writing about the big winners and seeking applause. We also have a company-wide Failure Forum where we share our failures and celebrate the risks we take on the path to innovation. When Joanna Lord was at Porch, she talked about a ritual they developed at the company involving a pink fuzzy animal named Mr. Sparkles. Whoever failed the biggest each week would get Mr. Sparkles. As she put it: “You put him on your desk and it’s like this badge of honor that you like did something so bold that you literally messed up the site badly. And you know what I love? You see my CEO walk around the room and he’s high-fiving the Mr. Sparkles owner. And people are like, ‘What did you do? What did you do to get Mr. Sparkles?’ But the reality is we’ve made it a positive thing. We’ve made it a badge of honor. You are living out the Porch-y way in being bold. What can you do in your culture to make it fun and acceptable? And almost, you know, become famous for it.” In a broader industry-wide context, blogger and marketing consultant, Ryan Robinson, has long been an advocate of transparently sharing the behind-the-scenes stories of his own business failures with the readers of his blog: “I’ve launched several businesses over the past decade, and most of them have landed somewhere between mixed results and utter failure. I go out of my way to highlight those experiences in long-form stories to the readers on my blog, because it’s important to illustrate that the path to achieving meaningful results will be filled with missteps and lessons to be learned along the way. My failure-related articles are consistently the most popular with my readers.” 2. Be Careful With Case Studies I’ve ranted about CRO case studies a ton by this point, so it’s suffice to say I don’t trust most of them. Even if the data is accurate and you’re not reading about a blatant false positive on a sample size of 14, you’re likely looking at a PR piece that is almost certainly subject to Survivorship Bias.

Very few companies and thought leaders are incentivized to write about their failures and inconclusive experiments, so you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Sure, you can absolutely get some inspiration from case studies. But don’t look around in exasperation and think that everyone’s winning except you. It’s all an Instagram-esque illusion. 3. Embrace Transparency Shannon Callarman, a Content Marketing Specialist at ShipBob, told me about a cool ritual they’ve developed at her company to share candid feedback and ask probing questions: “Every month, ShipBob’s leadership team leads a forum called ‘Ask Me Anything’ that allows employees to ask candid questions about the growth of the business and internal operations, and they’ll get an honest answer.” When leaders embrace uncomfortable conversations and open themselves to feedback and questions, it shows the rest of the organization that it’s alright to do the same. Along the same lines, I find it worthwhile to explicitly outline and publicly post your team and company values. This helps create both an explicit and implicit operating system where your employees and leaders are encouraged to embrace your values (in this case, honesty and transparency). A great example of this is this post from BounceX’s CEO, Ryan Urban. 4. Embrace Being ‘Wrong’ In Ronny Kovahi’s talk at CXL Live a few years ago, he brought up a great point on A/B test results: the best case scenario is when you test something you thought was ‘meh’, and it wins. If you thought it was going to win, however, and it wins, you haven’t learned much. Value in experiments comes when the “absolute value of delta between expected outcome and actual outcome is large.” Yes, being wrong is the best possible thing that can happen to you when you run A/B tests! This is also the strategic basis for Andrew Anderson’s Discipline Based Testing Methodology — test a wide variety of options, some of which might be totally radical, and let the winner surprise you (you’d never expect Comic Sans to win a font test, right?). Celebrate being wrong and learning new things. 5. Hug the Messenger When leaders expect only good news, those who bring up problems or constructive feedback are looked upon unfavorably. In companies like this, the messenger is ritualistically shot. A better way to act is to embrace those who are brave enough to ask interesting questions and point out possible flaws in the data. Nigel Stevens, founder of Organic Growth Marketing, encourages an embrace of failure internally and externally:

“Whenever I only hear of ‘wins’ for a while, I start to get nervous. Because that tells me we’re not proactively sharing — and learning from — the things that don’t work.”

  Stevens adds, “Fortunately, we’ve developed a very healthy culture of saying ‘hey, this completely flopped, and now I’m sharing it with others so you all know.'” 6. Lower the Cost of Failure (and Experimentation) One of the most impactful things you can do within an organization, especially if you’re working on growth or conversion optimization, is to lower the cost of failure. A/B testing does this by nature — you can only lose as much as your losing variant lost during the course of the test. However, you can further decrease the cost of failure by making it easier and cheaper for everyone to set up and run trustworthy experiments. After enough optimization, the big and easy wins stop coming so frequently, so growth looks a lot like this:

This is, of course, a riff on Nassim Taleb’s ideas on optionality — he uses a chart similar to the above to describe trial-and-error tinkering and how it leads to stark innovation. Simply put, it’s impossible to achieve any degree of outstanding innovation without a tremendous amount of tinkering. The more at-bats you allow, the more optionality/luck/upside you can generally collect. Content marketing blogger and expert Levi Olmstead mentioned this attitude (fail fast) being key in previous startups he worked at: “A core value we often repeated was ‘fail quickly and continuously, iterate quickly and continuously.’ Without failing, you can never learn from past mistakes. In my experience, many ideas have strong pillars but they’re not full-fledged ideas. To create a strong, sustainable strategy, you need to learn how to fail and how to turn those lessons into future successes.” Making experiments cheaper and easier to run isn’t an easy feat, but luckily there’s a lot of material out there on the subject (I’d start with this paper from the booking.com team). 7. Invest in Trustworthy Data Data attribution modeling is still a large digital marketing challenge today. With different data models like first-touch attribution, last-touch, multi-touch, and others, teams need to choose one and stick with it. Adam Enfroy, who runs the popular marketing blog AdamEnfroy.com, witnessed this data challenge firsthand while managing digital teams for different SaaS companies, including BigCommerce: “Success theater often runs rampant in companies when teams aren’t aligned on which data platform is the final source of truth. This leads to different teams reporting on conflicting data sources that drive the (often misleading) narrative they want to tell.” Let’s take a weekly business review meeting as an example. Consider this — the digital marketing team pulls from Analytics Platform A because the ROI looks favorable with last-click attribution. At the same time, the business intelligence team pulls from Analytics Platform B, which doesn’t look as good but is more aligned with finance. Then the partner team pulls from a different data source entirely so they can take credit for more revenue. In the end, this leaves confused executives looking at three different data sources — and listening to three different stories — while no actionable insights can be gleaned. To avoid success theater, invest in trustworthy data and align teams on which platform is the ultimate source of truth. This involves strong alignment between BI, marketing, sales, and partner teams. Additionally, seek to stress test and constantly monitor the veracity of your data. As my friend Chris Mercer always stresses, “trust, but verify.” 8. Invest in Education Old joke … CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and they leave us?” CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?” This is true of any business function, but I find it particularly true in more technical fields like growth, conversion optimization, and SEO. There many ways to do this — invest in a library for your office, start a company book club, send your team to conferences, pay for training programs like CXL Institute or Reforge. HubSpot invests a ton in education and I always feel supported in learning new things (currently taking a course on Python and machine learning from Udacity). Small companies can do this, too, though (in fact, they need to). Ben Johnson, Head of Content at Proof, has seen the impact of this mentality at his SaaS company: “We’re a small team of 15, so a lot of time, you’re not going to be able to learn how to do something from someone in-house. For that reason, we’re always reading, meeting with more experienced individuals, and using our naivety as a strategic advantage.” Johnson adds, “Our leadership is great about encouraging this growth mentality across the organization — making introductions, providing funding for marketing conferences and programs like Reforge, and paying for a book per month. Overall, I think creating a culture of curiosity and helping your employees get the resources they need is a key part of building a growth culture.” 9. Diagnose Narrative Fallacy Storytelling is natural to humans, but it can also dilute efficiency and decision making. The Narrative Fallacy, popularized by Nassim Taleb, describes our tendency to ascribe a clean causal “why” to something that happened in order to simplify our understanding of the world. For example, if you A/B test two headlines against each other, you may determine that version B won “because it invoked social proof”, while someone else may attribute the win to “the clarity of new message”. A good way to transform your culture is to try to curb storytelling where you can, because while the narrative fallacy is limiting when ascribed to wins, it’s detrimental when people try to explain away suboptimal campaigns. Mark Lindquist, marketing strategist at Mailshake, mentioned one version of this is when people move the goalpost of what they define as “success” after the campaign is run (technically, this is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy): “Consider an SEO who is brought into an organization to grow top-of-the-funnel leads. 18 months in, they’ve 50x’d organic traffic, but leads are only up 15%.” Lindquist continues: “A story you could tell yourself would be ‘well, this is great for our brand. We’re getting our name out there and we’re on our customer’s radars when they are ready to buy.’ That may be true, but it probably isn’t, and it certainly isn’t based on any data. Start your marketing campaigns with clear goals, and if you don’t reach those goals, don’t pat yourself on the back for accomplishing something you never set out to do in the first place. Be radically transparent with yourself and your team.” Ultimately, the purpose of experimentation is to encourage innovation and to mitigate risk, and in the process, most of your ideas are likely to fall flat of what they were intended to do. The best next step is to dust off and iterate and keep learning and trying. Success theater may feel good temporarily, but risks limiting the scope of the program. You should celebrate wins, but feel comfortable sharing failures, too.

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51 Ideas from 2019

Dear Tribe Member,

Trust 2019 treated you well. It certainly was good for Safal Niveshak. The tribe crossed 60,000 members.

Anyways, right before the year ends, I thought I’d share a handful of ideas I’ve learned, re-learned, and wrote about in the past twelve months. Here are 51 of them categorized under the subjects of investing, learning, and life. I hope you find these useful, as much as I did.

I. INVESTING 1. Don’t Be Blind to Alternative Histories Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness –

…one cannot judge a performance in any given field (war, politics, medicine, investments) by the results, but by the costs of the alternative (i.e., if history played out in a different way). Such substitute courses of events are called alternative histories. Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision).

We are blind to alternative histories – those silent events that could have happened but didn’t. In the language of behavioural finance this irrationality is known as Survivorship Bias. The outcome which is visible, ‘survived’ and the ones which didn’t survive are hidden. As Taleb writes –

Imagine an eccentric (and bored) tycoon offering you $10 million to play Russian roulette, i.e., to put a revolver containing one bullet in the six available chambers to your head and pull the trigger. Each realization would count as one history, for a total of six possible histories of equal probabilities. Five out of these six histories would lead to enrichment; one would lead to a statistic, that is, an obituary with an embarrassing (but certainly original) cause of death.

The problem is that only one of the histories is observed in reality; and the winner of $10 million would elicit the admiration and praise of some fatuous journalist (the very same ones who unconditionally admire the Forbes 500 billionaires).

Like almost every executive I have encountered during an eighteen-year career on Wall Street (the role of such executives in my view being no more than a judge of results delivered in a random manner), the public observes the external signs of wealth without even having a glimpse at the source. Consider the possibility that the Russian roulette winner would be used as a role model by his family, friends, and neighbors.

In effect, the general belief is that if the outcome is good, the process and decisions made to arrive at that outcome must have been sound. Alas, life doesn’t follow such straight patterns. The randomness and ‘external factors’ play a defining role in life and investing.

2. Give Due Credit to Luck The world of investing, like most things in life, produces success stories and failures. It’s human nature to wish to copy success. However, the ironic truth is this: To accept success at face value without acknowledging the role of luck is a strategy for failure.

But it’s also important to note that luck, like love, is a verb. It requires dedication and effort and the conviction and courage to act. Like the father of value investing, Ben Graham, wrote –

…behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity.

3. Avoid Ruin You or me are not the market. Earning the long-term returns of the market, of the past or the future, is not in our control. Managing our risks and avoiding ruin, mostly is.

“Rationality is avoidance of systemic ruin,” Nassim Taleb writes.

Trying to avoid the ruin the stock market system enforces upon people who disregard its workings is rational. Believing that you can beat the system at it, by playing the game mindlessly, isn’t.

Peter Bernstein writes in his brilliant book Against the Gods –

Survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches.

4. Obsession with Outcomes is Damaging Most investment experts selling their services always highlight the outcome – so much return in so many months or years – and never the process they used to get this outcome. This is simply because, while the outcome is there for everyone to see (availability bias), investors rarely ask the question whether that outcome was due to the skill of the expert (a proper investment process) or merely luck.

This is not to say that results don’t matter; obviously they are extremely important in measuring success. But if the results have been largely thanks to luck, they may not come in as expected in the future.

What is more, if you focus only on the outcome, you are less likely to achieve it. Instead, if you focus on the process, the outcome will take care of itself.

But then, as published in here –

Despite the problems of using results as a barometer of decision quality, it remains endemic in investment. We use outcomes as a simple indicator and then weave narratives around these views. We take a difficult problem, simplify it (are results good or bad?) and then create a story to justify the outcome. This pattern of behaviour is evident in a range of poor investment decisions, such as: susceptibility to financial frauds, participation in investment bubbles, performance chasing and excessive short-term trading.

5. Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Here’s an excerpt from an insightful discussion that Naval Ravikant had with Babak Nivi –

Nivi: What’s the difference between wealth, money, and status?

Naval: Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots that’s cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, that’s serving other customer. Wealth is… even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower use of productivity of land than actually doing some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom.

So, you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

6. Warren Buffett’s Checklist I recently came across a video of Warren Buffett talking to a few B-School students on his trip to India in 2011.

The host asked him this question – What exactly goes through your mind when you’re actually making an investment?

Buffett’s reply to this question was brilliant for it contained the crux of everything he has said over the years about how to evaluate a certain business and it’s future economic potential (text in bold and brackets are mine) –

Well, if I drive by a McDonald’s stand or a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand I will automatically think to myself “What is this business worth?”

You know, how many customers can walk in the door (demand, scalability, growth potential)? What kind of gross margins (profitability, pricing power) can they have? How many people do they need (scalability)? How likely is it that another chicken stand opens across the street (competition, entry barriers, moat)?

I mean, all of those things. And that’s true of the chicken stand and it’s true of Google or you name the business. I mean, it’s all about evaluating the economic potential, the economic future of a given business. And most of them you don’t know the answer on (say no to most businesses, because you really don’t understand them).

But every now and then you run into one where you know the answer (simple businesses). But that’s all business is.

It’s what Aesop said a long time ago: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” (well, that’s the definition of discounted cash flow) You know, that was said in 600 BC and that’s now what’s called discounted cash flow and all that sort of thing. But he saw that and figured it out, you know, twenty-six hundred years ago. And all I’m trying to figure out is if I could take that dollar in my hand: When do I get the two dollars out of the bush (timing of future cash flows)? How sure am I of getting it out of the bush (certainty of future cash flows)? Is there some other bush where I can get three dollars out of it instead (opportunity costs, better alternatives)?

I mean, it’s very basic stuff (investing is simple, you see, but only if you keep it simple). And a lot of times you look at it and you say “I don’t know how many birds there will be in the bush.” (complex businesses, or those that undergo a lot of changes due to nature of industry, competition, etc.) So you go in to the next one until you find the answer (you just need a few good ideas in a lifetime).

Buffett, once more, makes it clear that rather than obsessing with the bewildering fusion of news and noise, you should concentrate on a few key elements in stock selection.

7. Know Thyself Taleb again from Fooled by Randomness –

It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one’s limitations – scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.

One of the most underrated but among the most valuable skills required to succeed in stock market investing is resilience i.e., the ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity – either in the market or in the businesses one is owning.

How easily can you bounce back from a market crash? What would be your reaction to a sharp decline in your stocks’ prices? How many ‘surprises’ can you withstand in quick succession? How safe are your overall finances in light of extreme stress on the equity component of your portfolio?

As Taleb says, we are anyways designed by mother nature to fool ourselves. But don’t forget what the noted financial writer George J.W. Goodman – who used the pen name of Adam Smith – wrote in his wonderful book, The Money Game –

If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.

8. Keep It Simple, Please In stock investing, often we focus so much on trying too hard that either we never start working on the process of picking up great businesses (seeing the enormity of the task), or we start believing that our immense hard work and knowledge gives us great control over the future of stocks we own.

The reality is that, no matter how hard we try to analyze the intricacies of business, we may not be as important to the results as we’d like to think we are.

Like Seth Klarman wrote in Margin of Safety –

Investors frequently benefit from making investment decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty.

The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy in at prices so low that they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information.

9. Investing’s False Positives The field of medicine has a term called “false positive.” It is an erroneous result that indicates that a given condition is present when it is not. An example of a false positive would be if a medical test designed to detect cancer returns a positive result (that the person has cancer) when, in reality, the person does not have cancer.

While medicine’s false positives often create panic about things that turn out to be nothing to worry about, investing’s false positives create euphoria about things that should have been worrisome in the first place.

And the underlying reason is that most people out there in the stock market judge the quality of their investment decisions by one single factor – the short-term price movement of the underlying security. And that’s exactly what they are looking forward to while making the investment, even while talking about the virtues of long-term investing and the need to ignore short-term price movements.

Noted French writer and philosopher Voltaire said –

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

10. Doing Nothing is Hard The idea of buying and holding high-quality businesses over a long period of time is simple. Everyone knows that, and even those who don’t practice it appreciate that this works with most high-quality businesses as history has proven time and again.

But then, it’s important to understand that the action of not doing anything over such a long period of time involves hundreds of decisions over months and years that lead to such inaction.

Of course, one way is to buy stocks and forget for 20 years and hope to end up with a fortune. There are quite a few such fairy tales you may have heard of. But the other side of the picture is that countless people have also ended with duds in their portfolios, or vanished companies, when they realized their father or grandfather had bought some stocks and forgot about them for 20 or more years.

11. Being Prepared In one of his lectures published in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger said this –

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of the lifetime.

A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind, loving diagnosis involving multiple variables.

And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favourable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past.

What Charlie says here is that it pays to be prepared in your investing life – prepared not just for the risks that may be lurking around the corner, but also for opportunities that may appear anytime.

Ironically, we are often prepared for none, and that is what causes us grief during the market’s ups (when we keep sitting on the sidelines) and downs (when we are enjoying the madness of the party).

Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in Letters from a Stoic –

Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings.

12. Seek Uncertainty Mohnish Pabrai wrote in his brilliant book The Dhandho Investor –

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The Street just hates uncertainty, and it demonstrates that hate by collapsing the quoted stock price of the underlying business. Here are a few scenarios that are likely to lead to a depressed stock price:

High risk, low uncertainty High risk, high uncertainty Low risk, high uncertainty

The fourth logical combination, low risk and low uncertainty, is loved by Wall Street, and stock prices of these securities sport some of the highest trading multiples. Avoid investing in these businesses. Of the three, the only one of interest to us connoisseurs of the fine art of Dhandho is the low-risk, high-uncertainty combination, which gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don’t lose much!

While value investors are typically averse to taking high risks, that’s more a reflection of the price they’re willing to pay for any given investment than the types of situations they most often pursue, which are often fraught with uncertainty.

As businesses constantly evolve and change in response to challenges and opportunities, the lack of clarity around those changes. And the risks inherent in the potential outcomes can cause share prices to diverge widely from underlying business values.

The ability to recognize and capitalize upon that dynamic, and understand whether it’s temporary or permanent, is a key element of what sets the best investors apart.

13. Why Most People Will Never Be Good at Investing …because most people in the stock market, most of the time, don’t do investing, which is…

Thinking how markets work,

Understanding how people behave,

Studying businesses,

Sticking only with what is simple and what they understand, and

Buying stocks at appropriate valuations.

Instead, they are busy…

Envying (others making money fast or losing money slow),

Cloning (others’ stock ideas mindlessly),

Predicting (future of markets, stock prices, and economy),

Fearing (missing out on future gains),

Regretting (past mistakes),

Avoiding (accepting current mistakes),

Denying (reality, especially when it’s harsh), and

Indulging (in useless information and noise)

And if that’s not all, these often lead us to –

Trading (frequently, which adds to our costs),

Averaging down (on bad businesses),

Boasting (about our lucky short-term gains), and sometimes

Trolling (other investors on social media, who have not performed as well as us in the recent past).

With such a busy schedule, where is the time to practice investing?

14. Pay Attention In the story The Adventure of Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes asked Inspector Gregory to consider a curious incident involving a dog. Gregory replied that nothing happened, and Holmes proclaimed, “That was the curious incident.” This clue enabled Holmes to deduce that the culprit must have been someone familiar to the victim’s dog. Most people would miss this important clue because most people, like Gregory, pay little attention to nonevents.

Now, some information is always available, but some is always silent – and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up. In investing, such information that remains silent – or that you fail to notice – can be dangerous to your capital.

To pay attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to take everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking important questions and making sure we get answers.

Even when you do this, you may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and you may end up making a choice that, upon further reflection, is not the right one after all. But it won’t be for the lack of trying.

15. Be a Curator of Stocks, Not Warehouse Manager We spend the first half of our lives adding things, and the second half subtracting most of them.

Investing follows life, and this is also what a lot of investors end up doing. They create crowded warehouses of portfolios in the initial years of their investment careers, realize most of their choices were mistakes, and then they start subtracting vigorously.

Lest you lose out on the positive compounding timeframe, you will do yourself a world of good by respecting and practicing this lesson – of saying no to most things, of not adding a lot of unwanted stocks to your portfolios – early.

In other words, be a curator of stocks, not a warehouse manager.

16. Bharat Shah on Investing Successfully One of the best theories I have read on the importance of investing in high-quality businesses in the Indian context comes from Bharat Shah of ASK Group, who has written a book (sad, it’s not available publicly) titled “Of Long Term Value and Wealth Creation from Equity Investing.”

I recently came across his old interview where he shared his insights on value investing and how he formed his investment process and principles. A passage from the interview reads thus (emphasis mine) –

…successful long-term investing calls for two vital technical capabilities or craft and two personality traits. While craft can be honed and refined by observing and absorbing, character traits have to come from within and be developed.

The two essential skills are: ability to comprehend and grasp the true character and the innards of diverse businesses as well as the ability to value them. Till these abilities are developed, one cannot become a good investor.

The two vital character traits are: discipline (or temperament) and wisdom. Discipline lies in investing only into quality businesses and the temperament of not getting carried away by the fads of the markets and buying such quality businesses only at a meaningful margin of safety.

17. Biggest Financial Regrets One of my favourite financial writers, Barry Ritholtz, wrote about the biggest financial regrets people have. This was based on a survey of over 2000 people by American life insurer giant New York Life, and found these as the biggest financial regrets –

Image Source: Biggest Financial Regrets – Barry Ritholtz Barry concluded thus, and I completely agree with this –

The sooner you begin to accept mistakes are inevitable, stop beating yourself up over them, and just fix what is not working, the faster the compounding can start.

18. No Stock is Safe The bulls may want you to believe this, but no stock is safe.

There are businesses that may remain good (earning return on capital greater than cost of capital) for some time, maybe a long time, but you must not attach infinite values to them.

This is because high returns attract competition, generally causing return on capital to move towards the cost of capital. While such companies may still earn excess returns, but the return trajectory is down.

Everything in this world, after all, is momentary. So, your best bet is to just stick with quality (even that is momentary, just for longer moments that allows time for compounding to work its magic).

The good thing about high-quality stocks is that you can pay up for them (never overpay), expensive looking prices, and still do well till the underlying businesses remain good.

With poor quality, most probably, you have no hope.

19. Businesses will Die Death will happen to all of us and to all of our businesses, and that must not worry you. It’s the stagnation and gradual decline that diseases (bad management, capital misallocation, etc.) bring along, that you must watch out for (and try working backward now so as to avoid them, except for bad luck).

20. Equanimity and Investing When it comes to investing, making money in stocks when everyone is making money in stocks isn’t a big deal. Rather, it’s the ability to handle good and bad times with equanimity, combined with courage and decisiveness, that really matters in the long run.

Of course, most of us simply aren’t wired to be equanimous at most of the times, and it’s terribly difficult to rid ourself of the emotions of ecstasy (when things are looking up) and misery (when things are looking down).

And that’s why ensuring that we avoid all of those ways that can cause us wealth destruction – trading, timing, high fee, inadequate diversification, and leverage – is paramount.

Everything, including our triumphs and disasters, anyways shall pass. But the equanimity with which we allow them to pass will keep us sane always.

As Lord Krishna taught Arjuna, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we can learn to accept everything that comes our way, with equanimity and without sacrificing our best efforts, that will be true Yog.

So, give equanimity a shot, and see what happens.

21. Five Ways We Destroy Our Wealth It’s common if you are wealthy to worry about losing your fortune due to forces beyond your control. Like market meltdowns or economic stagnation.

But what many of us don’t realize is that our own behavior may be the root of significant losses.

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes a proverb. The road to investing hell is paved with bad behaviors, and here are the five roads which initially look like paved with gold, but which often take us towards wealth destruction.

Daniel Kahneman was right when he said this –

A human being is a dark and veiled thing…and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves.

We certainly are.

22. Avoid Stress I recently read this passage from Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness that tells something about why we must avoid stress –

…people who look too closely at randomness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. Regardless of what people claim, a negative pang is not offset by a positive one (some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one); it will lead to an emotional deficit.

…people in lab coats have examined some scary properties of this type of negative pangs on the neural system (the usual expected effect: high blood pressure; the less expected: chronic stress leads to memory loss, lessening of brain plasticity, and brain damage). To my knowledge, there are no studies investigating the exact properties of trader’s burnout, but a daily exposure to such high degrees of randomness without much control will have physiological effects on humans (nobody studied the effect of such exposure on the risk of cancer).

…wealth does not count so much into one’s well-being as the route one uses to get to it.

23. Why Value Investing Works Jack Schwager, the author of Market Wizards series, when answering a question on whether value investing works, turned to the wisdom of Joel Greenblatt, one of the foremost experts on the subject.

Schwager quoted this from his interview with Greenblatt –

Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing.

The fact that the value approach doesn’t work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

24. Patience Wins Most people participating in the stock market don’t really understand what they are doing. This is especially when making money gets quick and easy, and they are doing great at it.

Like Aesop’s wolf in sheep’s clothing, they play a role contrary to their real character, which often leads them to the slaughterhouse.

However, the lack of patience of such people to invest with a long-term horizon creates the opportunity for the few committed to long-term holding periods.

In the battle between impatience and patience, the latter wins.

25. Eternity and Investing The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing created a wonderful video in 2013 titled ‘Legacy of Ben Graham,’ which contains bytes from some of his students on how Graham’s teachings changed their lives.

Marshall Weinberg, one of the students from Graham’s class said that the biggest lesson he drew out of that class was on long-term thinking. Here’s what he said –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Spinoza actually said, “Sub specie aeternitatis,” which translates to “under the aspect of eternity,” or “from the perspective of the eternal.”

Critics of this idea may believe that with such thinking, there is no reason to believe that anything matters. But where Spinoza may be coming from is the idea that, in the larger scheme of things, nothing matters, which leads us to put our pains and struggles – including, as investors – into perspective.

26. Types of Managements People come in different shades, and managers are people.

Here are three different types of management (there may be more, but let’s go with these three for now), and my thoughts on how you may want to deal with them when it comes to investing in the businesses they manage.

Most of us overlook the human aspect of operating a business, yet, in most cases, the future success of a business is directly tied to the quality of the people managing its affairs.

27. Skin in the Game Having skin in the game means being exposed (equally as other stakeholders) to both positive and negative consequences of an outcome which was made possible by your decisions/actions/approval.

Superficially, the concept of ‘skin in the game’ may look like a case for morality in human transactions but if you go deeper, you will find that it’s a wonderful trick for improving our own decisions.

When you own 50 stocks and one goes to zero, your portfolio isn’t going to move down by more than 2 percent (assuming you had equal allocation for each stock). Which means you’re not really bothered about a couple of bad decisions for it’s not going to create meaningful damage to your net worth. However, when you run a relatively concentrated portfolio of 10 stocks, you’d be more careful about choosing those stocks. Won’t you?

28. It’s Not Supposed to Be Fair Warren Buffett had high regards for David Sokol. Over the years Sokol established a reputation inside Berkshire Hathaway as Mr. Fixit. Buffett often referred to Sokol as a terrific manager, a brilliant dealmaker and a huge asset to Berkshire.

In 2011, Sokol abruptly resigned. It was speculated that his resignation was because of insider trading allegations. For a second put yourself in Buffett’s shoes and imagine how you would feel when one of your most trusted business partners who has worked with you closely for decades behaves in a totally unexpected and undesired way? Like Sokol did.

When asked in one interview if he had felt betrayed by Sokol’s behaviour, Munger replied —

It’s not my nature … when you get little surprises as a result of human nature … to spend much time feeling betrayed. I always want to put my head down and adjust. I don’t allow myself to spend much time ever with any feelings of betrayal. If some flickering idea like that came to me, I’d get rid of it quickly. I don’t like any feeling of being victimized. I think that’s a counterproductive way to think as a human being. I am not a victim. I am a survivor.

The world around us is largely a soup of random events loosely connected by a few broad patterns. And one of those patterns is that the universe doesn’t care for any individual’s personal agenda.

If your investment journey has thrown a few bad apples your way, if you feel that the world is not fair then be reminded that the world is not supposed to be fair. It’s not supposed to be fair in your favour or in anyone’s favour.

29. Avoid Multiplying by Zero Two academicians were debating on the superiority of their respective fields of study.

“What would you do if I brought Alexander The Great’s army in front of you?” The history professor challenged.

The mathematician rolled his eyes and replied, “I’ll enclose the army in a bracket and multiply by zero.”

In an additive system, each component adds on to one another to create the final outcome. Such systems are unaffected when they encounter a zero. Multiplicative systems, on the other hand, are non-linear because anything times zero must still be zero, no matter how large the string of numbers preceding it. A zero can wreak havoc on multiplicative systems. Like it did to Alexander’s army.

Shane Parrish, on his excellent blog, explains the functional equivalent of multiplicative system in the world of business –

Most businesses, for example, operate in a multiplicative system. But they too often think they’re operating in additive ones: Ever notice how some businesses will add one feature on top of another to their products but fail at basic customer service, so you leave, never to return? That’s a business that thinks it’s in an additive system when they really need to be resolving the big fat zero in the middle of the equation instead of adding more stuff… General Motors, founded in 1908 by William Durant and C.S. Mott, came to dominate the American car market to the tune of 50% market share through a series of brilliant innovations and management practices, and was for many years the dominant and most admirable corporation in America. Even today, after more than a century of competition, no American carmaker produces more automobiles than General Motors. And yet, the original shareholders of GM ended up with a zero in 2008 as the company went into bankruptcy due to years of financial mismanagement. It didn’t matter than they had several generations of leadership: All of that becomes naught in a multiplicative system.

Benefit of looking at the downside or what can go wrong is efficiency, writes Peter Bevelin, “Take investments as an example – If you first eliminate what doesn’t work or what won’t achieve what you want, you don’t have to spend a lot of time and attention of analyzing the company. If there is a huge downside – for example a catastrophe risk of the key factors that are needed for success aren’t there or any other disqualifying factors like no sustainable advantage, bad and untrustworthy management of something else – just say ‘no thank you.’”

II. LEARNING 30. Being Average in the Age of Alpha Our society and culture values high achievement in every area of our lives. We want to become alpha men and women, have the brightest careers, accomplished children, ideal bodies, investment performances that beat everyone, and financial prosperity that leads us to possess more stuff than others.

Amidst this, being satisfied with having “enough” is considered shameful. Being unambitious is considered lazy. Thinking “I have enough” is a sin. “Average” is a dirty word.

I recently read an article written by one Krista O’Reilly, which echoed exactly what I have felt about being average all my life –

The world is such a noisy place. Loud, haranguing voices lecturing me to hustle, to improve, build, strive, yearn, acquire, compete, and grasp for more. For bigger and better. Sacrifice sleep for productivity. Strive for excellence. Go big or go home. Have a huge impact in the world. Make your life count.

But what if I just don’t have it in me? What if all the striving for excellence leaves me sad, worn out, depleted? Drained of joy. Am I simply not enough?

31. Two Big Lessons from History I believe there are two things that have stood the test of time, and that apply to everything we do in life, investing, work, everywhere –

We have much less control over the future than we hope, and that it will always surprise us (surprisingly!). We can’t control what would happen to us or our investment portfolios, we can’t control what people around us would say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which would get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. In fact, much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things like these that, in fact, we can’t.

We have far more ability to make an impact than we expect. And this ability is more important than we can imagine. All it requires for us is to be learning and adapting machines, be sensible in our decision making, keep things simple, and trust the role of sincere hard work. Some people are aware of it; most are not. Frankly, it is easier to sit on the sidelines and whine about the stuff we can’t control (like stock prices) than to own up to what we do control (like our process of investing).

In short, while we can’t control the future, we can be courageous enough to jump into life with both feet and take responsibility for how we would like to mold it (without trying to control it), and how we would react to what happens to us on the way.

No success guarantees here, but history proves that’s how the world has always worked.

32. A More Beautiful Question Since early childhood, most of us learned that our parents did not like us asking many questions and that only authority figures – most grown-ups – had the right to ask them. The result was that we stopped questioning things and accepted what we saw, heard, and were told with meek acceptance.

Sadly, this approach worked well in the industrial era, but proves futile in the knowledge era, because it compromises our ability to think and understand deeply.

In his book, A More Beautiful Question, which I glanced through recently at a bookstore, Warren Berger led me to the importance of asking thoughtful, ambitious “beautiful questions” — the kind that can help us grow into happier and more useful human beings. An insightful passage from the book reads thus –

We’ve transitioned into always transitioning…In such times, the ability to ask big, meaningful, beautiful questions – and just as important, to know what to do with those questions once they’ve been raised – can be the first step in moving beyond old habits and behaviors as we embrace the new.

In the modern era, we must use unfamiliar tools in our attempt to take on new challenges without clear instructions, and with the clock ticking. In such times, Berger writes –

…questioning…will be even more important in helping us figure out what matters, where opportunities lie, and how to get there.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers,” said Voltaire. Now, more than ever, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our questions.

33. How Not to Bet 90-year-old Jeanne Louise Calment struck a deal with a forty-seven-year-old lawyer named André-François Raffray. Raffray agreed to pay a low monthly subsistence payment of 2,500 francs to Jeanne in exchange for the right to own Jeanne house when she dies. The ninety-year-old French woman had already exceeded the French life expectancy by more than ten years. She could die any day.

Ms. Calment turned out to be the biggest outlier in human history. When she died aged 122, her age at death exceeded the lawyer’s age at this death by forty-five years. He ended up paying Calment the equivalent of €140,000. That was more than double the apartment’s value.

Where did Raffray go wrong? His blunder was in taking the statistics and applying it to a sample size of one.

Legendary investor, Howard Marks relates a funny story his father told him about a gambler who bet everything on a race with only one horse in it. How could he lose? “Halfway around the track, the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. Invariably things can get worse than people expect.”

Jeanne and Raffray’s story has a valuable lesson for investors. Never bet the farm on a single stock no matter how certain you are about the outcome. You never know when the luck hands you the equivalent of a crazy horse or a supercentenarian.

34. Possessing Vs Pursuing I believe our lives are not defined by what we possess, but by what we pursue. History has ample proof that it is not what people (like Alexander and Hitler) have tried to possess, but what people (like Einstein and Gandhi) pursued that brought meaning to their lives and to those around them.

“I enjoy life,” Seneca said, “because I am ready to leave it.”

In his book On the Shortness of Life, Seneca wrote this –

As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.

Imagine if we can unburden ourselves of 90% of our worldly goods, it should not be difficult to leave the remaining 10% behind?

35. What Stories Do You Believe? A story is a very effective tool to package any message or an abstract idea. Stories themselves are unimportant. What’s more important is the idea the construct of a story is enclosing inside it. An idea doesn’t stick well if it’s not packaged in the form of a story.

Our experience of the world is almost completely derived from the stories we have told ourselves.

Celebrated historian Yuval Noah Harari writes —

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’ or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

Take a pause and question yourself, “What stories do I believe in about the reality and have they served me well?”

36. Writing is a Thinking Tool Writing, apart from being a communication tool, is a thinking tool too. Famous author, Dan Pink, recommends – “write things to figure out your thoughts”.

Writing is a powerful weapon for focusing thoughts. The more you write, the more precision of thought you build. It allows you to take fuzzy thinking and distill it into precise line of thought. If you want to think better you have to start writing your thoughts.

When Michael Mauboussin posed the question to Daniel Kahneman, what is a single thing an investor can do to improve his or her performance, he said –

…go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think…When you’ve got a decision-making journal, it gives you accurate and honest feedback of what you were thinking at that time.

Writing is a thinking exercise and it acts as a shield against the mental rust.

37. Opposite of a Good Idea Both Amazon and Apple are technology companies with close to trillion-dollar market cap each. Amazon sells products as cheap as possible. Apple prices its devices as expensive as possible.

In marketing, there are two equally potent, but completely contradictory, ways to sell a product. Luxury goods offer the promise of owning something which can’t be owned by everybody, i.e., a scarcity bias informs the worth of the product. And we also find comfort in buying stuff which has been rated high by millions of others, i.e., we look for social proof in making our decision.

Similarly, two opposite points of view can both be rational without violating any laws of logic or physics.

Remember, situations where we get two accounts of the same event, but the versions are dramatically different, it’s because they’re informed by different facts and perspectives.

In other words, understanding the context is very important before announcing your verdict on what’s right or wrong.

38. Curiosity Kills the Cat, but You’re not a Cat Sometimes, when you’ve figured out the answer to a question, you realize that the path between the question and its answer was more interesting than the two endpoints.

Which means the journey that your curiosity takes you through becomes more rewarding than the end result. And the great thing about following your curiosity is that no one can stop you and you can keep going.

Follow the process. And the process is — keep scratching the itch of a probing mind and never letting the fire of inquisitiveness to die down.

Put simply, it doesn’t matter what question you begin with. What matters is —

How rigorously you chase the clues,

What assumptions you make to simplify a complex problem and transform it into a more useful one, and

How long you’re willing to remain discontent with your discoveries.

To expect to begin your quest with only intelligent questions could be overwhelming and you may never get started.

So, start small, start stupid and let your curiosity take you places.

39. Risk of Avoiding the Non-Risk In 2014, an AirAsia flight crashed into Java Sea killing all 162 people on board. Investigations revealed that it was caused by a pilot error because he performed a non-standard reset of the onboard flight control computers. Why did he do that? Because he wanted to get rid of a non-critical warning light that was flashing on his panel.

The gap between what’s risky and what feels risky is significant. The perception of risk is often misplaced in most people’s head.

Nick Maggiulli writes —

…you can hold 100% bonds and experience little short term volatility (i.e. low risk right?), but you now risk not having enough principal in the future after your portfolio battles against the scourge of inflation for multiple decades…remember that you are always taking risks. The key is understanding what risks you are taking and when you are taking them.

Risk and the perception of risk are two different beasts. What doesn’t seem to hurt in the short run lulls people into complacency and just when they feel the safest the storm of accumulated risk arrives with no advance notice and causes the blow-up.

III. LIFE 40. Weathering Life’s Storms In Kafka On The Shore, Murakami wrote –

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

41. Dealing with the Scary World In Aaron Thier’s wonderful new novel, The World Is A Narrow Bridge, there is a scene where Eva and Murphy, the two young prophets of the god Yahweh, are sent on a mission that terrifies them. As they begin the mission, Eva and Murphy are approached by Satan, who has been sent by Yahweh, to give them their final instructions. After Satan gives the instructions, he begins to leave for his next mission:

“You have to go so soon?” says Eva. “Right away?”

She looks devastated. Murphy, too, is unhappy. Satan frowns and chews on his lip. He doesn’t like to leave them like this.

“I’ll teach you a trick,” he says. “I’ll teach you an incantation that will protect against despair. If things are dark, and I’m not around to help, you can repeat it a few times and it’ll help.

It would go something like this: ‘The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.’”

Murphy and Eva both repeat this very slowly. Eva says, “That’s lovely.”

Satan nods. “Just repeat it to yourself when things are bad. You could try different translations too. ‘Do not make yourself afraid, the whole world is a narrow bridge.’

The point is this life we’re living—this world we inhabit—is a scary place. If you peer over the side of a narrow bridge, you can lose your heart to continue. You freeze up. You sit down. So too with life. If we think too much about the journey we have to make, the one that begins with the trauma of birth and ends with the tragedy of death, the one that is so perilous and unpredictable, we’ll never make it.

The important thing is that we are not afraid. That we don’t overthink things. That we don’t give way to fear, as the Stoics tell us over and over again. Just repeat it to yourself—The world is a narrow bridge and I will not be afraid—and keep going. Like the thousands of generations who have come before you.

42. Life’s Purpose and Meaning Tuesdays with Morrie was one of the best books I read in 2019. In one passage, the author wrote something that resonated well with me –

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

43. Hope and Fear Seneca wrote –

Limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope … and you will cease to fear.’ … Widely different [as fear and hope] are, the two of them march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope … both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future. Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

44. Power of Meditation Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens, wrote this beautiful passage in his book –

According to Buddhism, the root of suffering is neither the feeling of pain nor of sadness nor even of meaninglessness. Rather, the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. Even when experiencing pleasure, it is not content, because it fears this feeling might soon disappear, and craves that this feeling should stay and intensify.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In meditation, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing – joy, anger, boredom, lust – but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it. It is like a man standing for decades on the seashore, embracing certain ‘good’ waves and trying to prevent them from disintegrating, while simultaneously pushing back ‘bad’ waves to prevent them from getting near him. Day in, day out, the man stands on the beach, driving himself crazy with this fruitless exercise. Eventually, he sits down on the sand and just allows the waves to come and go as they please. How peaceful!

45. Karma One of the best books I read this year was No Shortcuts to the Top. This is an autobiography of Edmund Viesturs, wherein he documents his 16-year journey summitting all 14 of the world’s eight-thousander mountain peaks (more than 8,000 meters above sea level), and his strategies to manage risk in extreme environments.

In one beautiful passage from the book, Viesturs wrote –

Although I remain uncertain about God or any particular religion, I believe in karma. What goes around, comes around. How you live your life, the respect that you give others and the mountain, and how you treat people in general will come back to you in kindred fashion. I like to talk about what I call the Karma National Bank. If you give up the summit to help rescue someone who’s in trouble, you’ve put a deposit in that bank. And sometime down the road, you may need to make a big withdrawal.

46. Widening our Circles of Compassion Long before Carl Sagan wrote of compassion as our only mechanism for moving beyond “us vs. them,” Einstein wrote in 1950 –

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

47. Humility In The Apology, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that the oracle at Delphi had pronounced Socrates the wisest man in Athens.

No one was more astonished and disbelieving than Socrates himself. So, he immediately set out to disprove the oracle by finding a wiser man. Here is what Socrates found as he met a few supposedly wise men –

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him – his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination – and the result was as follows: When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

In the end, Socrates discovered he was indeed the wisest man in Athens. Not because of how much he knew, but because he was the only one who understood how much he did not know.

Knowing that you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

Knowing that you don’t know, accepting it and not being ashamed about it is the start of a continuing journey of wisdom.

Recognizing the darkness is the prerequisite for bringing on the light. Only when the darkness is brought out of hiding does the light have the opportunity to illuminate it.

48. Meaning of Life One of the best books I have read on the pursuit of the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, is George Mallory’s Climbing Everest. George was possibly the first man to summit Everest (nobody knows whether he did it), almost 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay began their ascent. It was during his third expedition to the Everest that he lost his life, last seen about 800 feet from the summit.

Anyways, all his writings on climbing are collected in Climbing Everest, which started out as letters to his wife Ruth. One of my favourite parts from the book is when George shared his response to one question asked by a journalist about why he would risk his life to attempt to reach the Everest.

His profound response outlines an undeniably powerful way to perceive life –

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron…

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

What a beautiful, inspirational thought!

Life is never perfect. And as George wrote, living is not just about eating and making money.

Facing adversities and challenges head on, and stepping away from what is comfortable and familiar to us and into the unknown, is what often brings us real joy.

That’s what gets us life’s real worth.

49. Triumph and Disaster One of the most life-changing books I have ever read is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The book is a chronicle by Frankl of his experiences as a German Nazi concentration camp inmate during World War II.

In this book, Frankl describes his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.

The central theme of Frankl’s book is ‘survival.’ Although he witnessed and experienced horror, the book focuses less on the details of his own experience and more on how his time under Nazi rule showed him the human ability to survive and endure against all odds.

As Frankl wrote, he saw the lowest parts of humanity while in the camps. He saw fellow prisoners promoted to be in-camp guards turning on their fellow prisoners. He watched as they beat their lifeless, malnourished campmates. He watched sadistic guards treating them as if they were lower than animals. But he also saw individuals rising up like saints above it all.

The part that impacted me the most from the book was this –

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Life (investing included) isn’t easy. And unlike, what we imagine in both scenarios of triumphs and disasters, life isn’t supposed to move in a straight line of happiness and smiles, or sadness and pain. It’s not supposed to stay the same, just like you’re not supposed to stay the same.

Life is evolving and changing. It is a constant surge of ups and downs, twists and turns, and as Rudyard Kipling said, “…triumphs and disasters.” Like you have your happy and blissful moments, you are supposed to feel pain, get hurt, and experience losses occasionally. And some of them can be really bad!

Now, that does not mean that you deserve every bit of the sadness, defeats, and tragedies that life hands over to you. It’s just part of the journey that we are walking through. It’s just part of what makes us human.

50. Meditating on Mortality Meditation on mortality (that we are going to die one day) is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “…of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”

But why should we contemplate our own death while we are still alive?

“It cures you,” the Bhutanese say. Not just the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures, even Stoicism talks about Memento Mori that is the practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits.

Now, the thing about meditating on your own mortality is that it doesn’t make life pointless. Instead, knowing that you will die one day creates priority and thinking about it helps you live with a more positive perspective. So you can focus on what’s important.

Death is, however, a subject mostly shunned by our cultures and societies. Nothing explains this resistance better than what the American actor and comedian Woody Allen said in one of his movies, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying; it’s just that I don’t want to be there when it happens.”

51. What Papa Taught Me I lost my father late this year. Papa was a genuinely good man – good in a pure, innocent, unfailing way. He wanted, more than anything, to do good in the world, to always do the right thing. That is one attribute I picked up from him, and I thank God I did that.

Another thing I learned from Papa was that the best life one could live was not one in which a person did big, great things that influenced the lives of millions, but one in which you made a difference in the part of the world you touched, no matter how small.

He said that a life in which you helped only one person because that was the only opportunity you had to help someone else was just as great a life as that of someone who changed the lives of millions.

Perhaps the best way I can celebrate Papa’s life is to try as hard as I can to walk in the world with the same compassion, humility, love, and joy that he carried with him so that the light of his life will not extinguish even after the passing of his mortal body.

“Your parents, they give you your life, but then they try to give you their life,” said Chuck Palahniuk, the noted American fiction novelist.

Papa, I realize now, gave me his life. I hope I stand up to it.

Thank You Before I close, let me share with you the Serenity Prayer that has helped me a lot in facing my personal, professional, and investing turmoils. I am sure if you keep this prayer close to your mind and heart, it will help you face your own turmoils well, including those related to your investing.

The Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish you a happy, healthy, and peaceful 2020.

With respect, Vishal

The post 51 Ideas from 2019 appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

51 Ideas from 2019 published first on https://mbploans.tumblr.com/

[topicprinter]

I made a comment the other day on a post on here that was quite poignant to me and was related to possibly the biggest theme in my own life the last 2 years.I don't come on here much and rarely comment. I'm not sure why I come to r/rentreprenuer these days but I think it's because I find it interesting to browse through what goes through other peoples minds in relation to this subject. I tend to see the same things repeat themselves quite often and I guess I just kind of have an urge to get a few things off of my chest that I hope may help a couple of you out.If anything I say on these posts comes across as negative or harsh towards 'wantrapreneurs' or early starters, please forgive me- I too have been where they are several times throughout my career and I have made many many mistakes.(Pre post edit- I've added the * symbol to sentences where I may trigger offence but in fact this is something I have been guilty of myself)There are several crossovers within the points which I maybe should tie up and summarise at some point and please bear in mind that other than emails I am not an experienced or particularly good writer.Well here goes... I'm going to start with a few 'Don't Do's'.Aiming for the StarsOnce or twice a year I meet up with an old army buddy of mine. Every so often we do it in his home town and he brings a couple of his mates from school he still drinks with- every damn time there's this one guy who calls me Mr Money (I don't think Im anywhere as wealthy as he thinks I am) . He's obsessed with money and entrepreneurship despite never having set anything up himself, he quickly turns the conversation to my current and previous endeavours and then proceeds to start pitching me with some of his own.I think what annoys me the most about him is that he reminds me of how naive and pie in the sky I was myself in my early twenties. Most of his ideas are either far too lofty and ambitious to be the basis of a credible starting point or are too complicated/ niche/ in an unknown market to be in any way feasible to make a start on.The worst part though is that these ideas always have the aim of making millions.I have personally lost more by either giving up or not putting enough effort into ventures that would be nice little earners because of they were exactly just that. When I was 24 I completely messed a business that turned over half a million and paid me personally about 80k because I didn't think it was scalable enough to make me a millionaire by the time I am the age I am now.I'm still not a millionaire and other than by creeping over the line at some point by the way of investments I have no real desire to be.My advice to anyone starting out is to think small... like really small. And really simple.The smaller and simpler it is, the easier it will be to start. It will also make it easier to replace yourself by paying someone else to do most or all of the work for you. You can then work on expanding the business and/or diversifying your business interests.My position now is that I have several 'nice little earners' and am in the process of starting another. The bulk of my weeks work is in what I call my 'job business' where I am basically a part time consultant to a large multinational. The remainder is on my side hustles. These side hustles employ people who do most of the work and my role is in providing the direction and authority that most people need (more on this later).The main thing on these side hustles is that they are fairly run of the mill, they're not that 'economies of scalable' and they're in no way revolutionary.They're just simple, startable, runnable and profitable businesses.Looking for too much adviceThis should really head up the list. The fact that many of you are here will be that you are looking for advice*. Like I said in my opening comment, Im not looking to put anyone down.My own searching for the missing secret, that one little tip (or list of a hundred) or that 'thing' that I was clearly missing has cost me more than anything else, if not more than every other mistake combined.If I had just trusted my gut more and worked through a few more (as Bob Ross puts it) Happy Little Accidents I would have gotten to where I am now far sooner and far more enjoyably the first time round.​We don't know what we don't know- this much is true. But the important thing to get clear on is- How much do I need to know right now?​Overcoming the anxiety of not knowing everything one would ever need to know to make a success of things and just getting going and keeping moving is probably one of the biggest contributors to success I have seen in others and is certainly the biggest in my own rise from the ashes.One of the main reasons I feel qualified to write on this subject is not just my own 'average success' but that fact that I am very fortunate to know and count among the friends of quite a large number of self made people. I'm not sure how unique I am in this respect but I think I must be somewhat unusual that many friends, family and friends of friends are business starter/ owners. As a keen observer and one time habitant of a special kind of 'Self Help Hell' I have spotted common themes in so many of them that I almost feel that I can't be wrong about them.My own going from a bit of a f&*k up to what I now consider to be a very ideal situation by aligning my own behaviour with the more useful ones that I have observed in those others, really validates to me what I've learned.​The reason I make and stress this point is that the things I have seen work for other people is almost entirely at odds as most of the things that the 'gurus' and self aggrandising entrepreneurs you see on youtube and on the top ten non fiction books list all the time.​One of the things that most of the gurus keep telling you is that you need to keep reading and learning and consuming everything that the 'success' industry has to offer. I completely disagree with this and other than a healthy interest in ones (slow and steady) personal development I really think that most of it should be avoided.I think we all learn better by simply doing and that there isn't really that much to learn.A) You don't need to know what the routines and habits of billionaires and ultra successful people are, besides, most of the writers of these types of books are more than likely way off about just how normal these 'superhuman' people really are.B) By reading a lot of this cr@p you are more than likely decreasing your chances of achieving your own version of average success. You may, as I did, get into the really bad habit of comparing yourself to people that are so far out of your league in terms of luck/ circumstance, confidence and natural ability that you can beat yourself into a depression.C) By reading the stories and autobiographies of famous entrepreneurs you are reading the story they like to tell, which will have to be in line with what they have told other people in private or at paid after dinner parties; and hence will unlikely be exactly the truth. There will also be a lot of a survivorship bias in their recollections of the epochs in their journey.​Not one of the really successful people I know did any of this searching for the holy grail of advice. In fact they almost all did the opposite- they got busy, trusted their gut and in multiple cases actively avoided external advice expect for single issue specific problems where they would speak to or hire a consultant.​By telling yourself that you will be able to do it if you can just read this list of a few more books or go to this seminar- you are telling yourself that you lack the actual natural ability that many successful people rely upon for the bulk of their progress.I'm not saying that some of the stuff in the plethora of books on the subject won't help at all in any way, but I am saying that you really don't need it and much of it is misleading, unnecessary and bad for your self esteem.I could probably bang on about this some more but I'm going to leave it at that for now.-You can do it and you don't need a motivational book to help you do so.​Desperation to have a business/ Lack of patience.One of the things I see on here a lot is really a desperation to be an entrepreneur and wanting to do so right now rather than later* (when conditions are more suitable) and while I suppose everybody's desire to do so will be as unique as them, I think a lot of people fall into the categories below.Sadly, again, I think that the self help industry and its regurgetators helps fuel the 'screw it just do it' mantra- but for myself and those that I know that have gone on to (eventually) do well, setting things up right and making each next step was on a firm footing have been key.Yes you have to take risks and sometimes fail* but throwing all caution to the wind and going all in on the first turn of the cards doesn't pay off in my experience.Here are some examples of desperation and impatience:Not fully understanding how money works and think the only to feel safe/ comfortable/ happy is to have lots more of it* and due to being also lower educated* that the only way out is to be a successful entrepreneur*. Jumping into starting a business before one is mentally and financially ready in order to cure a lack of wealth.For the vast majority of people who were born into the lower classes of wealth*, it's common to think that the best way to rid of the default empty insecure feeling is to have more money and that the only real option do so is to be a business owner- this is some ways true but can easily lead to desperation.- Learn to understand how money works and live below your means before you start trying to make more of it.​Feeling that one is different and hence somehow better than the majority of everyone else; and therefore should exist at the top of the food chain*. Starting a business rather than exist alongside the hoy polloi.Also somewhat true but can also easily lead to desparation.It wasn't until life turned me upside down and smacked my a$$ did I realise that humility felt better deep down and was more useful.- Get used to the fact that you are very very average in the big picture. You will be a better leader, salesman and producer/ purveyor of goods if you put your fellow man on an equal standing.​Hating something at work- either the job itself or someone in it.No * as only partially guilty here.Hating ones boss/ colleagues or feeling superior to the work can often be the source of desire for entrepreneurship and in my opinion is a bit of a recipe for disaster. If you are in this boat I really strongly recommend you learn how to tolerate and get on with people and the drudgery of boring work. Entrepreneurship has plenty of that in store for you.You will have a hard time with your staff, suppliers and customers if you can't put up with dealing with a few d!(kheads. While owning the business will give you a bit more choice and control over who you deal with and how, I think that people who find it hard to get on with people wherever they go tend to be the source of many of their own problems and will fair no better as the one in charge.- Learn how to get along with people before you start.- I dont believe in being manipulative in anyway but there are indeed some truly horrible people out there, you have to be able and willing to outsmart and feign commonality with them or they will take advantage of you.It's definitely not wrong to desire to be an entrepreneur and I dont suppose there really is a bad reason to start. I guess the point I'm making is that owning a business isn't a 'get out of a sh!tty situation' card but should be more of a chance to be a little bit more of yourself and to give the market a slightly better product or service than exists presently. Don't get involved with things you aren't capable of understanding and don't start for the wrong reasons and you should be okay.OverthinkingI said there was going to be some crossover here and I think this is one of them points.Too many people don't get started on things or start on the wrong things because they overthink key parts of the journey- usually far before the situation has arisen.Again this can lead to the addiction to business and self help books- it keeps feeding the unknown unknowns conundrum and even worse lets people think they are doing something about their desire for entrepreneurship.There will be problems, there will be boredom, there will be hard times. The road ahead meanders through the hills and mountains; a continuous hike of ups and downs- the plateaus are few and bring with them their own fears and worries.Get going and learn as you go. You'll figure it out. If you're realistic about what you're setting out to do, the problems you'll face will be more manageable and more in line with your current capabilities.​​I'll call it there for now and if you're interested I guess I'll keep writing.​​​​​​​

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In the era of President Trump, it’s become fashionable to presume that politicians can do whatever they like and get away with it. But if recent elections to Congress are any guide, scandals do have large and measurable effects. So when Chris Collins, the Republican U.S. Rep. from New York’s 27th Congressional District, was arrested on insider trading charges on Wednesday morning, it took a seat that had looked to be fairly safe for Republicans and put it into the competitive category.

I’m going to be fairly circumspect in this article because I’m knee-deep in finalizing our House model, and I don’t want to scoop our own forecast. But one of the things we evaluated in designing that model is the electoral effects of scandals, based on the dataset of scandals put together by my colleague Nathaniel Rakich.1

Below is a list of scandal-plagued incumbents since 1998 who made it to the general election and faced an opponent from the opposite party.2 I’ve compared each incumbent’s actual margin of victory or defeat against a projected margin based on “fundamentals” model that accounts for: (i) the incumbent’s previous victory margin,3 (ii) the partisan lean of the district,4 (iii) the generic ballot at the time of the election, (iv) Congressional approval ratings at the time of the election (which are a good proxy for the overall mood toward incumbents), and (v) the incumbent’s Congressional voting record (representatives who break with their party more often overperform on Election Day). This is a slightly pared-down version of what our House model will look at, but it should be a fairly robust and reliable model.5

How much do scandals hurt incumbents?

It depends on how competitive the district is

Year District Incumbent Projected Margin Of Victory Actual Margin of Victory or Defeat Net Effect Of Scandal 1998 GA-6 Newt Gingrich 31.2 41.4 10.2 1998 ID-1 Helen Chenoweth 23.4 10.5 -12.9 1998 IL-6 Henry J. Hyde 32.6 37.2 4.7 1998 IN-6 Dan Burton 51.4 55.3 3.9 2000 GA-7 Bob Barr 21.0 10.5 -10.5 2004 OH-14 Steven C. LaTourette 34.0 25.5 -8.5 2006 MI-14 John Conyers, Jr. 78.1 70.6 -7.5 2006 PA-10 Donald Sherwood 25.1 -5.9 -31.0 2008 FL-16 Tim Mahoney 7.6 -20.2 -27.8 2008 NY-15 Charles B. Rangel 82.4 81.3 -1.2 2010 MA-6 John F. Tierney 22.3 13.9 -8.4 2012 FL-26 David Rivera 12.5 -10.6 -23.2 2012 NY-11 Michael G. Grimm 10.3 5.4 -4.9 2012 TN-4 Scott DesJarlais 24.8 11.5 -13.3 2016 NC-9 Robert Pittenger 27.2 16.4 -10.9 2016 NH-1 Frank C. Guinta 5.4 -1.3 -6.8 2016 TX-27 Blake Farenthold 28.5 23.4 -5.1 Overall average 30.5 21.5 -9.0 Districts less competitive than NY-27 45.7 42.0 -3.7 Districts more competitive than NY-27 19.8 7.1 -12.7

Shaded districts were more competitive than NY-27 based on their partisan lean.

On average, the scandal-ridden incumbents … won re-election by 21.5 percentage points! But that’s quite a bit worse than their projected margin of victory, which was 30.5 percentage points. The net effect of a scandal is about 9 points, therefore. (This finding is reasonably consistent with previous research on the topic.) Fourteen of the 17 incumbents underperformed their projection by at least some amount, and the three exceptions came a relatively long time ago, in 1998. (There’s no evidence of the effect of scandals decreasing in recent elections; if anything, it’s increased slightly over the course of the data.)

Moreover, the effect of scandals is potentially greater in competitive districts, where the other party has an opportunity to mobilize a real alternative. Let’s use New York’s 27th Congressional District as a dividing line, for instance. It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R +22, meaning that it’s 22 points more Republican than the country as a whole based on its voting in recent presidential and state legislative elections.6 That type of district is ordinarily quite safe, but is just on the fringe of what could become competitive if everything breaks right for the opposing party — for example, in an election in a wave year against a candidate who just got arrested by the FBI. In districts less competitive than NY-27, scandals cost the incumbents only 4 percentage points, on average. But in districts that were as competitive or more competitive than NY-27, candidates with scandal issues underperformed their fundamentals by an average of almost 13 points.

So does that make Collins’s race a toss-up? You could do a little mental math: If the scandal costs him 13 percentage points, and the national environment favors Democrats by 6 points, that could produce a 19-point swing toward Collins’s Democratic opponent, Nate McMurray — almost enough to offset the strong Republican lean of the district (22 points). But you’d be leaving one thing out: Collins is still an incumbent, and incumbents usually outperform the partisan lean of their districts.

In fact, the incumbency bonus in recent elections has been in the very low double digits — on the order of 12 percentage points.7 (It used to be quite a bit higher.) That’s just about the same as the magnitude of the scandal penalty. The typical scandal, therefore, essentially wipes out a candidate’s incumbency advantage and makes the district perform similarly to an open-seat race. But it doesn’t necessarily reverse the advantage. Republicans would be favored to win an open-seat race in NY-27, even amidst a very blue national political environment, so they’re probably still favored with Collins on the ballot too.

There’s one more complication, however, which is that this data suffers from survivorship bias. The candidates with really bad scandals will often retire rather than seek re-election, or they may lose in their primary. If all scandal-plagued incumbents were forced to be renominated, we’d probably observe a scandal penalty even larger than the 10 or 12 points we’re showing here.

But in some ways, Collins and the New York GOP are in a position where their hand has been forced. New York has already held its primary and Collins is the nominee; the general election is in only three months. He seems disinclined to bow out. And it isn’t entirely clear whether it would even be possible to replace Collins on the ballot even if Republicans wanted to.8 This is the type of scandal that might have induced a retirement if it had occurred a year ago, but the GOP may not have that choice.

The Cook Political Report moved NY-27 from non-competitive to its “Likely Republican” category after the news on Wednesday morning. I might go one step further and put it in the “Lean Republican” category instead, even though it’s a really red district. (It went for Trump by 25 points in 2016.) Soon, we’ll be able to tell you what the FiveThirtyEight House model thinks too, so it’s back to work on that.

But in general, Republicans face a very long list of potentially competitive districts — places where Democrats aren’t necessarily favored at even odds, but have a fighting chance when they have no real business doing so. That list got one seat longer after Collins’s arrest. Cashing in a few of those lottery tickets is what might turn a near-miss for the Democrats into a narrow majority — or a narrow majority into a wave.

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2018 midterms.

[johnsellph]

Writing History

There’s something comforting about the the Tour de France. Every year the same rituals and routines, whether pre-race previews, the familiar stage towns, the peloton riding past sunflowers… and Mark Cavendish winning stages.

Cavendish got his 34th stage win and equals the record set by Eddy Merckx. Comparisons with Merckx arise because they’re level on stage wins but there’s not much to compare, they are very different riders competing in their own eras. Put frankly Merckx won his 34 stages on the way to a lot more.

But Cavendish as the best sprinter of all time. It’s a subjective exercise although given Cavendish has also win Milan-Sanremo, the Worlds, stages in the Giro and Vuelta to make 155 pro wins, plus the surprise longevity of his career make him an obvious pick. Proximity can be a bias, see the way the “greatest songs of all time” always include a sprinkling of contempory hits that won’t stand the test of time when the same poll is done five years later. But Cavendish isn’t just impressing today, we can remember his older hits too. There’d be no argument here if forced to pick “the best sprinter” but each rider is a product of their era.

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André Darrigade, the Hare of the Landes, won 22 stages of the Tour de France and two green jerseys, two in the Giro and was world champion in 1959. All this in an era when bunch sprints were more rare, there were more openings for attackers, indeed he took some wins solo too. Today Darrigade runs a bookshop in the seaside town of Biarritz and when the Tour visits France’s south western corner he’s often a podium guest to greet the day’s winner.

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Freddy Maertens was more than sprinter but won plenty of sprints. As Wikipedia will tell you, between the 1976 Tour and 1977 Giro, Maertens won 28 out of 60 Grand Tour stages, including 13 in one Vuelta on his way to winning it overall. He won the worlds and the green jersey competition three times plus a stack of classics.

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Mario Cipollini was the best in the early 1990s and 2000s and a big personality to go with his prolific wins. Many teams had used sprint trains before but Cipollini and his Saeco team perfected it. Cipollini, a world champion too and Sanremo winner too, won more stages of the Giro than Tour, in part because that was what his Italian team wanted; his squad were not invited to the Tour because the organisers were frustrated with his altitude sickness, he’d flee for the beach as soon as the mountains arrived. Coming from a team time trial background his long sprints impressed, he could launch with 300 metres to go and win. But working with Michele Ferrari dented his image and revelations about his personal life have done more damage, this doesn’t affect his palmarès, just you might not see him invited to trade shows or TV studios as much.

Mark Cavendish now has 34 stage wins, a world title, the green jersey from 2011, a world championship, Sanremo and more. Arguably the only thing missing is Paris-Tours and a big Flemish classic like Gent-Wevelgem. But Paris-Tour has lost its lustre for the sprinters and Gent-Wevelgem has mimicked the other Flemish one day races by adding more climbs and cobbles to become a Ronde clone rather than the classic all the sprinters have to win. Anyway, Cavendish hasn’t stopped yet, there’s still Libourne and Paris if he can get past the Pyrenees.

All the suggestions above are light, just the headline wins and they’re deliberately served up to avoid making conclusive comparisons. There’s little point trying to parse a palmarès and compare win counts, the quality, the manner of the wins and more. It could be a fun way to spend a winter evening but it’ll always be subjective: invent a ranking and it’ll probably tell us more about the person doing the ranking than the sprinters.

Even comparing Cavendish isn’t easy, his stage win today comes 13 years to the day when he won his first stage. Could the “Cav” of today beat the Cav of old? Probably because sprinting has got faster, riders frequently use 54T or 55T chainrings, bikes, wheels, clothing and helmets are more aerodynamic. Perhaps if we could put today’s Cavendish on his old Columbia team-issue Giant from 2008 then the younger version would win. But by now we’re going down rabbit holes and and imaginary software simulations.

Cavendish winning today is a fascinating story of survivorship bias with so many rival sprinters falling by the way. Dylan Groenewegen and Fabio Jakobsen’s comebacks need more time, Fernando Gaviria’s faded, Caleb Ewan’s crash took him out, Tim Merlier’s yet to finish an Alpine stage race, Mathieu van der Poel’s left to focus on the postponed Olympics, Arnaud Démare missed the time cut. Plus Sam Bennett banged his knee setting off the chain of events that put him out of the Tour… and in came Cavendish to a Tour with a route to suit as well. He can only beat who is in front of him but it’s this longevity that impresses, that he is still around to pop up for these wins aged 36. Besides today nobody goes “ah but Darrigade didn’t have to face Jean Graczyk or Pierrino Baffino in the 1950-something Tour” or “Merckx would have had 35 if he didn’t puncture that day”. History records the winners.

Writing History published first on https://motocrossnationweb.weebly.com/

[jeromengassa-blog]

Why Pseudo Experts Cannot find Coconuts in Coconut IslandH

Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or

survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful

record, and become pervasive, widespread and general. Other DNA will vanish.

Let me give you 3 practical examples that shows in a nutshell what I mean:

First example, take google control more than 80% of traffic online

Microsoft control more than 80% of PC, LAPTOPS and other device produce out there

,Facebook, twitter are the behemoth of social media with close to 90% of the lion share This by the way Is the reason why I always say – history is written by the winners, the visible, the salient

Second example: Take a marketer or a consultant who launches an online course, with 100 000 people on his/her list as base line. At the end of the course the expert will take performance of the top 10 or 20   are now very successful which here is called the survivorship bias- the rest will end up in the graveyard.

   Third Example: In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call

"talent" generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great

deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De

Vany, an insightful and original thinker who single-mindedly studied wild

uncertainty in the movies – wild uncertainty is also call the complex domain or the unpredictable domain. He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe

to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor,

he claims—and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie.

The success of movies depends severely on contagions. Such contagions

do not just apply to the movies: they seem to affect a wide range of cultural

products- such as books, online courses. It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love

with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that

they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—that is,

Other imitators. It fights solitude in the meantime as we hate solitude and crave society, as nature draws men to each other, so in this matter also there is an attraction which makes us desirous of friendship. When you start buying a best seller in London because you heard it hits the New York bestseller list, you are no longer independent- you are subjected to interdependence.

    First: The kernel point of my thoughts is – you cannot understand a group of persons, or a nation-party by from the observation of the behaviour of a single individual. Why because the market is not driven by the average- it is driven by people plus interaction- therefore you cannot really see how things aggregate by studying individual behaviour. This is the reason why I recommend those of you who haven’t listen or watch “When lightening hit, we do not change the laws of nature” and by the way

Second, we are more likely to mistake skills with convex luck than convex luck with skills explain just as certain objects which are perfectly straight, when sunk in water appear to the watcher as bent or broken off.[15] It matters not only what you see, but with what eyes you see it; our minds are too dull of vision to perceive the truth.  By the way …………. not which is the title of the next episode

  For more clarity :

with skills in the Mediocrestan, you're going to be very successful, have a happy life, be upper middle class, probably, you know, you're going to definitely do very well with skills in Mediocrestan, because the link between action and reward is going to be very visible, and you know what to do.

In Extremistan, skills are often necessary but highly insufficient, you see? So if you're a writer, you need to, you know, be able to compose sentences. You need - you can have all the ingredients, yet fail because "Harry Potter" is going to take the shelf space and you're going to be, you know, out of print and people are not even going to notice your existence, you see or someone like Tony Robbins,Rich Shefren Brendon Burchard?

So because Extremistan, one person wins everything. There's a much higher dose of luck in Extremistan.

Third: Clearly people may discuss a book because 1) they heard about it, 2) their friends like it, 3) they are genuinely impressed with it. The first two are extrinsic reasons and seem to partake of general social contagion effects. The latter is intrinsic

Check out this episode!