Lance Armstrong: There is something highly offensive about exploiting cancer survival, making an industry out of it; in addition to making such a survival an accomplishment. Quite disheartening to those no less worthy but who will not be capable of overcoming the disease.For obvious reasons, I am entitled to comment on the subject.
via Lance Armstrong:….
A government stating “we will not stand idle in front of atrocities committed by foreign dictator xxx” is typically trying to mitigate the guilt for standing idle in front of more atrocities committed by xxx.
The optimal solution to being independent and upright while remaining a social animal is: to seek first your own self-respect and, secondarily and conditionally, that of others, provided your external image does not conflict with your own self-respect. Most people get it backwards and seek the admiration of the collective and something called “a good reputation” at the expense of self-worth for, alas, the two are in frequent conflict under modernity.
(cont) Most people resolve the tension by cherry picking ethical rules, fitting ethics to their actions.
via The optimal….
Public & powerful figures tend to get admiration in inverse proportion to proximity; happy are those at the bottom of the ladder who have it the other way.
Seems the paper NNT published the other day Spurious Tail.pdf is causing quite a stir. A lot of it [Time, CNBC, WSJ] is just so much financial news filler, but certainly a Felix Salmon post deserves our attention.
The professions you really want to avoid, after reading Taleb’s paper, are not financial but rather creative. Where do you find millions of people all trying to succeed against the odds? Just look at how many bands there are, how many aspiring novelists, how many struggling artists. Nearly all of them think that if they create something great, that will improve their chances of success in their field. But given the sheer number of people they’re competing against, and given the fact that the number of breakout stars in each field is shrinking rather than growing, the fact is that just about everybody with massive success will have got there by sheer luck.
via The secret to success in the arts | Felix Salmon.
HatTip to Dave Lull who also points out a comment on the post from NNT!
Nassim says:
August 15, 2012 at 9:33 pm
Thanks Felix,
I agree with everything but one thing to point out: the finance industry looks less a winner-take-all because of the large survivorship bias.
My idea is mostly about the *future* spurious tail: there are so many track records to compete with.