Category Archives: Contributors

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

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Full article here: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat nonGMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny, say no more than five percent of evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the public relation firm that smears scientists and scientific whistleblowers on behalf of big corporations. Do you need to send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO, provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference appears to be small enough to be negligible as (perishable) food costs in America are largely, about up to eighty or ninety percent, determined by distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as organic food (and designations such as “natural”) is in higher demand, from the minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up accelerating in its effect.

Commencement Address, American University in Beirut, 2016

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Full speech here: Commencement Address, American University in Beirut, 2016

Greed and fear are teachers. I was like people with addictions who have a below average intelligence but were capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself and these theorems became interesting. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. Then I became dumb again when there was no real action. Furthermore, as a trader the mathematics we used was adapted to our problem, like a glove, unlike academics with a theory looking for some application. Applying math to practical problems was another business altogether; it meant a deep understanding of the problem before putting the equations on it. So I found getting a doctorate after 12 years in quantitative finance much, much easier than getting simpler degrees.

How To Legally Own Another Person – Evonomics

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In its early phase, as the church was starting to get established in Europe, there was a group of itinerant people called the gyrovagues. They were gyrating and roaming monks without any affiliation to any institution. Theirs was a free-lance (and ambulatory) variety of monasticism, and their order was sustainable as the members lived off begging and from the good graces of townsmen who took interest in them. It is a weak form of sustainability, as one can hardly call sustainable a group of a people with vows of celibacy: they cannot grow organically and would need continuous enrollment. But their members managed to survive thanks to help from the population, which provided them with food and temporary shelter.

Source: How To Legally Own Another Person – Evonomics

Black Swan Review | Lexaholik.com

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Reader Alex passed along his recent The Black Swan book review.

Why Do You Recommend This Book?

The Black Swan made me realize that living a carefully planned out life is a mistake. I remember after I first read the book at the now-closed Borders on Michigan Ave in Chicago while I was still in law school. Afterwards, I walked around outside dazed and confused, and feeling like I’d been living my life all wrong.

What was in the book?

A lot of information, actually, but everything sort of revolves around just a few core principles that stick with me to this day:

  • The events with the greatest impact in your life (Black Swans) are unexpected;
  • They are unexpected because of a variety of cognitive biases; and
  • No matter how hard we try, we will fail to predict these consequential events.

Think back to the biggest events in the U.S. of the past few decades. We’re talking about things like the Internet becoming popular, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, or the Global Financial Crisis. None of these things were expected or predicted. If you read books/articles these days, they all describe a linear history where these things were expected to happen. There’s a ton of hindsight bias in written history, and Taleb gives us more specific details as to why.

Link to full review: http://www.lexaholik.com/black-swan-the-impact-of-the-highly-improbable-review/