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optimism is highly valued; people and companies reward the providers of misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality — but it isn’t what organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred approach.
—Daniel Kahneman: via Bloomberg
overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.
—Daniel Kahneman: via NYT
You’re a JD candidate. You expect it will provide for a predictable and lucrative career despite the massive price tag. However, law school hardly looks like the ticket it once was. With law firms shrinking around the country, clients insisting on flat rates, and a new wave of highly sophisticated outsourcers, both domestic and international, not only are there fewer jobs, those that do emerge are less stable and less remunerative. Whoops!
Then the news cycle begins. Expert networks, once an obscure service to a niche industry, find themselves in the middle of a string of insider trading investigations. Read the rest of this entry »
remembering the fact that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose
…your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life
—Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed
In memoriam – Tennyson
This is a story about outrage in the media. It starts with Rick Santelli, the on-air editor for CNBC’s business news, whose outrage would become the stuff of tea party legend. And it finishes with Alessio Rastani, an otherwise unknown “trader,” recently invited to share his thoughts with the BBC, whose stark admission to the profit-motive stumped his interviewer and outraged the lookers-on.
Where Santelli clothed his remarks in morality, Rastani appeared unconcerned with right and wrong – only profit and loss. They may appear worlds apart, but they were in fact two sides of the same view – one that defines competition as the organizing principle of society and markets. Read the rest of this entry »
Khuzami went further at the hearing and declared that “anybody who is beating market indexes by 3 percent and doing it on a steady basis” could be a suspect
–From Roger Lowenstein’s piece on Insider Trading in the NYT
The power of games is in part that they provide such clarity in defining the roles and goals, that they helped us to know what to do and how to do it, and as such, they motivate deeper forms of learning. Gamification, at its worst, rejects a theory of intrinsic motivation in favor of one based on extrinsic motivation. That is to say, it attempts to motivate “proper” or “desired” behavoirs through attaching points to otherwise mundane and uninteresting activities. For example, Foursquare represents a gamification of consumer loyalty programs.
—Henry Jenkins, talk at USC, May 2011: via ACA Fan
The decision in Citizens United v. FEC incited much debate and hand-wringing. Are companies people? Is corporate speech protected? Does the metaphor of the market apply to freedom of speech and, if so, does that mean more regulation or no regulation?
One thing it did not anticipate, however, was more transparency.
The New York Times reports today that Citizens United contains within it the lances by which to slay the opaque shadows of corporate interests said to soon dominate the airwaves and field of public debate. The opinion and those who wrote it, notably, Scalia, would have the free and open expression of corporate interests, but only if they are held responsible for their statements.
Says Robert Scalia, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
It is not a complete revocation of the unbridled free-market conceit equating speech to a marketplace. But it does impart caution into the notion that if it’s a marketplace, then we should eliminate all regulation forthwith.
Stilltitled 