fortune cookie power ratings (part 2)

Hi everyone,

Let’s resume my recent spring cleaning project of going through the fortunes I’ve hoarded over the years, determining whether each is True, False, or Racist, and making a decision about whether to keep it.

The days you work are the best days.

The first time I saw this fortune, I laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea. Everyone hates work, right? The boss yelled at me again, what a great day!

I considered it a little differently when I realized that accepting multiple definitions for work changes the meaning of the fortune. Sure, in terms of what people grudgingly do for a living, the concept is ridiculous. However, the work of building and creating fulfilling lives is among the most satisfying activities.

True, False, or Racist?

False. Although I recognize that ‘work’ is not bound to a single interpretation, I think for most people work is a reluctantly accepted means to some other end. I suspect our society’s glorification of work also leads some to exchange what might be a fulfilling career for higher pay in a less meaningful field – exchanging meaning for means, so to speak – and I think stamping out this message will help many stay on a path that best serves their deepest, non-material needs.

Keep it or chuck it?

Chuck it.

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.

This is a classic fortune structure – present recognizable yet shallowly understood concepts and frame them in the context of a needless duality. The result is messages like this one that look clever on the first glance and leave satisfied diners nodding in admiration.

Unfortunately for fortune cookie writers everywhere, I have thought a lot about wisdom and I have a working definition – wisdom means knowing when your experience is relevant. This has nothing to do with doubt because doubt means knowing something yet pausing to double check or second guess.

True, False, or Racist?

False.

Keep it or chuck it?

Chuck it.

There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but only one view.

This is another example of the ‘classic fortune structure’ because most folks have never climbed a mountain yet can probably form a basic mental approximation of the task.

I disagree with both ends of this message. There are some mountains that have only one path to the top (unless you make an exception for flying a helicopter, I suppose). I’ll leave this point to you, reader, for further dissection.

More importantly, there are so many more views than just one. I know some climbers are satisfied by their accomplishment while others can only think about the next challenge. I’m sure some climbers consider ways to help others reach the same place while others take pride in the solo accomplishment. Finally, there are those who feel the ascent completes the mission while there are others who suspect the journey down is the real mountain.

True, False, or Racist?

False.

Keep it or chuck it?

Chuck it.

reading review - deep thinking (riff offs)

Hi all,

Today, I’ll wrap up my review of Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking with some of my responses to a few of his thoughts that I did not cover in my prior posts.

Merely leaving its life’s work behind can disrupt a fragile mind.

This universally observed phenomenon seems to emphasize that the sensation of loss in the wake of losing or stepping away from work has more to do with the subtraction of work itself rather than the loss of the natural support structure that comes with work. It might not be the fragility of a mind that is relevant; perhaps the more important concern is how the loss of the people, places, and things inseparable from the work destabilize the mind to the point of fragility.

Humans tend to downplay work ethic as a talent and often go so far as to hold the two concepts entirely separate. But isn’t work ethic just as much a form of talent?

My high school basketball coach used to say “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” It was even briefly printed on the back of our program's t-shirt. The expression fed into our underdog mentality and I liked how the mantra motivated our team to work.

I take a different approach to the concept today. Like Kasparov, I think hard work is a form of talent. In fact, I would even consider whether hard work is the only talent, or at least its most indispensable component. What's the point of talent if you never work hard enough to make use of it?

It kind of works like literacy. The ability to read is a talent that takes many years of effort to learn and cultivate. And yet, many joyfully waste their literacy by simply remaining too lazy to benefit from their reading ability. What’s the point of literacy if you never bother to read?

If a very talented or able person does something others do not immediately understand, it often can be assumed that this action merely expresses the underlying talent or ability.

Let’s suppose you are competing with an opponent you consider superior. This person makes a move or a decision that you cannot figure out. Are you going to assume it was clever or an error? I think most tend for the former because the opponent's superiority makes it seem implausible that the opponent would commit an error.

The argument for assuming a smart person always makes smart decisions is a good one - a smart person makes smart decisions! However, you must believe in yourself, your knowledge, and your instincts ahead of another’s reputation, title, or authority. Otherwise, how do you expect to ever see the truth in any situation, especially when reality runs against your perceptions? How will you ever achieve independence in your thoughts, behaviors, or beliefs?

A bad plan is better than no plan for those who want to learn from their mistakes. Otherwise, at best a person will only become a good improviser.

The most difficult aspect of learning from a mistake is separating a poor decision from bad luck. Those who plan can use hindsight to assess the various outcomes that might have resulted from different choices while those without plans cannot reliably think back to their options and cannot evaluate their decision making process with any rigor.

Narrative fallacies make it difficult to analyze games. A ‘winner made good moves because it led to a win’ does not account for how good the move itself actually was.

Michael Lewis described in Moneyball how baseball teams assessed the value of batting by comparing the result of a hit ball with other hit balls from the history of the sport that traveled with similar velocity and trajectory. If a hit resulted in a double 90% of the time and an out 10% of the time, the batter was credited with 90% of a double (and 10% of an out). This method reduces the impact of single outcomes on an analysis and helps keep the focus on the process instead.

Recent technologies have created a lot of spare time for us that we do not have the sense of purpose needed to make the best use of.

Luckily for us, TV, social media, and this half-assed blog are there to fill the void!

In my dreams I wrote the greatest song I’ve ever written, can’t remember how it goes…

I think it’s important to keep in mind that although the dream of a machine-based intelligence is always presented as a complete positive or a definite negative, the reality is always much more complicated. A computer that was smart enough to build a tree house might be the dream but until we bring Dreamland into reality it probably isn’t a bad idea to know what to do with a hammer and nails.

The devil is always in the details, I suppose…

…what?

Fine…

That’s not from Deep Thinking, that’s from Courtney Barnett’s ‘History Eraser’. But it is a riff off, you know, and who better…

Never mind.

Thanks for reading.

tales of two cities – what would a hubway doctor know

There’s a great scene in Happy Gilmore – well, there are a lot great scenes, but I should say there is a great scene that also applies to the following story. It happens near the end of the movie. Happy is walking down the fairway on the first hole of the last round when a rival’s accomplice drives onto the course and runs Happy over. A doctor comes out, examines Happy, and announces that his day is over. Happy gets up, says something intelligent along the lines of ‘the hell with that’, and stomps off to play more golf. The doctor throws his hands up in the air and says “Fine, do whatever you like. What do I know? I’m only a doctor.”

I've understood exactly what the doctor is feeling a number of times in my life. One such moment happens anytime I give someone advice at the Hubway rack next to my apartment (and this happens more than you think, reader). This rack has an unusual bug – it often seems like a perfectly usable bike cannot be unlocked no matter how many times a customer inputs the correct code or swipes a membership key. My guess is that this bug is due to the slight incline that points the front wheel up into the rack, but such speculation is irrelevant at the moment. Over time, I learned to recognize that the telltale sign of this bug is a drawn-out gurgling sound that comes from the rack while the rider is waiting to take the bike. (Coincidentally, this sound isn't much unlike the one made by Happy's favorite mini-golf clown, but unfortunately the rack does not spit out a bike, a golf ball, or anything else of value.)

One day, I grew frustrated with this problem and slammed my hand against the bike seat while the rack was gurgling away. Lo and behold, this did the trick - the unlocked bike slid past my stinging hand and crashed into the curb. This method became even easier about a week later when I figured out that I could bounce the back wheel of the bike against the pavement as the bike gurgled and get the same result - now, I could unlock the bike without causing any immediate harm to my hand and, more importantly, advise others without forcing them to suffer any unnecessary pain.

Like any good doctor, I figured that since I knew the remedy, it was my duty to cure the world of its ignorance epidemic. I quickly learned, though, that most of my fellow riders took Happy Gilmore’s approach to medical advice. Over the summer and the fall, I encountered a countless number of mystified riders standing alongside healthy but gurgling bikes. I would then suggest the trick, sometimes bouncing my own bike to demonstrate the remedy, but the rider who would swallow my medicine was the rarest person indeed. As I biked away and left these stubborn folks to foot their pedestrian bill, I always wondered how many doctors there are in the world who consider getting their patients to take the pills as their biggest problem.

leftovers - the 2018 toa awards – music (song review)

Let’s take a few moments today to talk about some songs I enjoyed from 2018.

‘Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way’ by U2

After considering a few candidates, I think I’ve settled on this song as my favorite from the band’s newest album, 2018’s Songs of Experience. I don’t have a ton to add about this song – it’s a good song from a good album but both seem likely to disappear into obscurity thanks to the band’s massive overall output. The song plays well live, a fact I learned firsthand in June. Of the many versions out there I think this one is the best.

The tour led me to return to some of the band’s older work and I emerged from the year with new appreciation for some of their classics. The performance of ‘Staring At The Sun’ from the Boston show was my favorite song from my first U2 concert – I think it did justice to this excellent 2001 version. I loved this piano-aided version of ‘Whose Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ from 2006 and enjoyed this 2010 performance of ‘Ultraviolet’. While I’m on the topic, I should note that I also liked The Killers’ cover of the latter – as I’ve noted in the past, the Las Vegas band has a gift for covering a song.

‘Graffiti’ by Chvrches

No ‘list of the year’ would be complete without a pure pop hit and this Chvrches single fits the bill. ‘Graffiti’ played well in concert but I think the most memorable version of it I heard in 2018 was this acoustic performance. The trio rose to prominence on the strength of their synth-driven performances but I suspect this won’t be the last time I’m pleasantly surprised when Chvrches decides to unplug for a song or two.

I mentioned in my concert review that I thought ‘Science/Visions’ and ‘Clearest Blue’ were their two strongest concert performances – linked are the best live versions I could find. I’ve also harped on how much I value a band’s ability to produce a good cover – this version of ‘Do I Wanna Know’ by the Arctic Monkeys proved Chvrches fit the bill while this rendition of ‘Somebody Else’ by The 1975 was probably my favorite cover of the year.

‘The Handler’ by Muse

Muse returned to the top of my music list in 2018 and I think ‘The Handler’ deserves some credit for their resurgence. It’s not just that the song is very good – it also made me interested in working backward through their work and led me to some older songs I hadn’t paid much attention to the in the past.

‘The Handler’ comes from 2016’s Drones. It has the self-contained energy of any great Muse song and in that sense is more of a great ‘Muse song’ than it is a great song by Muse. If I had to make a preposterous ‘music critic’ style analysis of the track, I would describe it as the before, during, and after of a spring downpour.

‘Cornerstone’ by Arctic Monkeys

The quality I noticed right away in this band was how easily the band captured a sense of nostalgia in their work – I think ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ and ‘Mardy Bum’ are the two best examples of this idea. ‘Cornerstone’ takes it a step further because the song isn’t just about nostalgia, it’s about the futile effort to actively recapture it, and in some moments I wondered if the song was written only to induce suffering.

The band has been around long enough to try some different things with their work. The aforementioned ‘Mardy Bum’ is a good example – I enjoyed this alternate version as much as I did the original.

A stroll down memory lane…

There were some longtime favorites that remained a consistent part of my music world in 2018. Here are a few links to the best live performances I could find:

‘American Pie’ cover by John Mayer
‘King and Lionheart’ by Of Monsters and Men
‘Sounds Like Hallelujah’ by The Head and The Heart
‘My Speed’ by Lake Street Dive
‘The Pieces’ by Slow Club
‘Landslide’ piano cover by vkgoeswild

And last but not least…

‘Dirty Old Town’ cover by Celtic Social Club

There are songs that you like and then there are songs that compel you to sing – for me, the latter category is microscopically small and therefore any song that enters such rarefied air requires mention in this space. This song has a rich history that includes many different cover performances – the list includes among others The Dubliners, Rod Stewart, and of course, U2. The version I like best is this performance by Celtic Social Club – it might not do justice to my earnest mangling of the opening verse, but it’ll do for now.

Thanks for reading – and listening.

i read twilight of the assholes so you don't have to

Twilight of the Assholes is a collection of Kreider’s poitical cartoons from around 2000 until 2008 – or to put it another way, from the Bush years. Each cartoon is accompanied by a short essay in which Kreider reflects on the circumstances surrounding the cartoon and adds any additional insight about its aftermath.

The most surprising aspect of this collection is how it repeatedly references events from over a decade ago that I swore I just read about in yesterday’s news. Kreider notes, for example, that when Bush met Putin, he looked him in the eye and determined that he was straightforward and trustworthy, that he was able to get a sense of his soul. Kreider also writes in 2006 that it was too easy for people to construct their own echo chambers and denounce any opposition as fools or traitors. In 2006! The most serious case of my reverse déjà vu came whenever Kreider comments on global warming. At the time, he asks in exasperation if the Bush administration was the last group on Earth to remain in denial about global warming… er, the answer is no, Mr. Kreider…

This final musing about global warming left me to wonder about how we’ll look back on the era of climate change denial. I’m not quite sure if I think global warming denial is the most evil thing ever done (and neither does Kreider, I suppose, although he does pose the question in those terms). However, history will choose somebody to be the face of climate change denials. I’m betting on whoever ends up being the last high-profile person to take up the position. I suppose it works a lot like speculators flipping shady assets at the height of a bubble – as long as you aren’t the last one in the game, you’ll profit handsomely from allowing someone else to take over your briefly held position.

reading review - skin in the game (riff offs, part 2 - the effect of the unseen)

Reader, today the long journey through my notes, thoughts, and observations about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game concludes at last. If you’ve made it this far, I congratulate you. And if you’ve enjoyed the posts, I humbly recommend reading the book itself.

Of course, you may be protesting at the moment – why read the book after such an exhaustive series of reviews? I agree with the thought, or at least the spirit of it, but in that case I’ll suggest one of his earlier works. A major shared theme among those books is the effect of the unseen or overlooked and I’m sure those who’ve enjoyed these posts will find plenty to like about those prior works.

Today’s post looks over some thoughts along that same theme from Skin in the Game – the effect of the unseen or overlooked.

Historians often create their own problems by relying too much on observed events and not considering enough the impact of the unseen.

This comment rings a little true for me. When I joke around here that there is always a reason and The Real Reason, I think I’m getting at a tendency people have to make firm conclusions based on what they observe rather than try to get the full context of what remains left to learn.

But what is the historian supposed to do, study the unseen? This would turn ‘the unseen’ into ‘the seen’, right? How would a historian access the unseen? Perhaps this thought probably says more about a person’s attitude towards the subject of history (and its perceived use) rather than towards the historian.

On a semi-related note, one of the funniest job descriptions I’ve ever heard was when my friend described a historian as someone who ‘knows what happened’.

Though it seems a contradiction that the Vatican goes to the doctor before turning to prayer, recall that voluntary death is banned by the faith.

If you like this type of thought, you must be the sort of person who gets excited for new Taleb books…

A degree in a certain discipline is likely BS if the prestige of the school is closely tied to the value of the degree.

…and this thought is the type that upsets readers once they get their hands on the new Taleb book.

Systems often collapse long before any structural defects can be cured.

This comment brings me back to his first bestselling book, The Black Swan, and one of the main premises from the work – instead of trying to predict inherently unpredictable events, we should try to find ways to mitigate the negative effects of such events. Countries in earthquake zones, for example, don’t predict the next tremor and evacuate two days before the coming quake – they design resilient buildings, educate the population on how to respond during an emergency, and conserve resources to help the hardest hit victims.

I think a common tendency is to look at a system’s defects and consider ways to fix them. This is an idea I like in theory but in practice a system’s defects are usually accepted evils that enable its strengths. My expectation is that those who attempt to fix such defects within a system often encounter a lot of unexpected resistance from those who stand to lose the most from the repairs. A more productive approach might be to learn the negative effects produced by a system’s defects and proactively find ways to limit the influence of those defects.

Isolating one variable and studying how subjects respond to minute changes in the cost or risk burden is not a rigorous way to study attitudes toward risk. For most, this decision is lumped together will all other attitudes or exposures to risk. A person who continues to take on or renew a small, ‘one-off’ risk will eventually face ruin.

This thought gets at the difficult task researchers set for themselves of trying to isolate factors in order to best understand people’s attitudes and preferences. Someone who keeps a fire extinguisher at bedside probably has a very different attitude towards risk than someone who doesn’t but this difference is unlikely to be reflected in behavioral or consumer responses to price changes in fire extinguishers.

Comparing the multiplicative with the independent leads to great distortions in understanding risk. One person killed by a bookcase at home is not the same as one person dying from contracting a highly contagious illness because the observation of the latter greatly increases the probability of another person suffering the same fate.

This was my favorite thought from the book and one I referenced a number of times in my many posts about Skin in the Game. It speaks to the difference between actions and interactions (one of the subtle themes from the book) and underscores the importance of knowing how to determine what will happen next given some event in the present.

A story of someone crashing a car is a tragedy but most such stories go ignored because yesterday’s crash has essentially no effect on the chances of you crashing if you go for a drive today. On the other hand, the panicked report about a shark attack (or even a shark sighting) always leads the news because it represents a slightly greater chance that you might get eaten the next time you go for a swim.

If more people die on the road than in the ocean, maybe we should lock up cars instead of sharks, and put them all in parks, where we can go and view them…

OK, fine, that wasn’t from Skin in the Game, it was from TOA favorite Courtney Barnett’s ‘Dead Fox’, who apparently in addition to being an excellent guitar player and songwriter also possesses a highly developed understanding of risk.

But who better to get the last word in a riff off?

Thanks for reading.

Tim

reading review - thinking in bets (decision making)

The main purpose of Annie Duke’s Thinking In Bets is to help others improve their decision-making skills. Although her book is full of many helpful tips and strategies, I thought a handful of specific ideas stood out in comparison to the rest.

First, I liked the suggestion to always identify as many alternative approaches as possible. The thought reminded me of something I read in a different book – a lack of good alternatives often leads to poor decisions. Duke recommends starting this process by analyzing winning outcomes and thinking of different ways to replicate the same result. This approach is a little easier than doing the same with a losing outcome because the positive result removes the ‘what-if’ factor that might cloud an inexperienced thinker’s analysis.

A second tactic I wish to highlight is the importance of remaining outcome-blind when considering a decision. This is a problem we might encounter when we are repeatedly faced with the same choice and have a history of results to consider as part of the decision. Although there is always a certain wisdom in sticking to a winning plan, it’s crucial to take the time to analyze those past outcomes and ensure that luck did not play an outsized role in creating the positive result.

I liked Duke’s explanation of how working backward from a goal or target is one helpful way to envision a successful decision. The idea also works in reverse if we think about what obstacles might prevent our success and plan ways to maneuver around those impediments. This advice strikes me as particularly useful for long-term or complex decisions where the inputs or factors we can influence today do not have any obvious or visible immediate consequences – working out the process in this manner will prevent us from making any irreversible choices that will doom our potential for success in the future.

Finally, Duke reminds us that the recent past does more to shape our emotions than the big picture. Those making important decisions must assess their emotional fitness to do so and seek out appropriate assistance as needed. If a decision must be made alone, we should always consider recent events and ask ourselves whether our emotions associated with those events are influencing the way we are considering the factors involved in the current decision.

fortune cookie power ratings

Hi everyone,

Many moons ago, I wrote a post introducing one of my truly clever ideas – the fortune cookie power ratings. In that post, I essentially expressed the following Talking Points:

1. I’ve always liked reading the fortunes.

2. I liked having reminders of home.

3. Not all fortunes made sense.

4. I’d recently noticed a subtext of ‘Confucius say’ racism in certain fortunes.

5. It might be fun for me to occasionally come on TOA and decide if recent fortunes were True, False, or Racist (a concept I cooked up in this ancient post).

At the time I did honestly think I would make this a regular TOA feature. However, looking back I realized that I should have placed greater emphasis on:

6. I rarely get Chinese takeout.

The reality of #6 meant I’ve basically gone all this time without acquiring any fortunes to analyze through my venerated TFR algorithm. Oops…

A couple of weeks ago, a solution emerged for my problem. For some still unexplained reason, an entire box of fortune cookies appeared in one of the communal kitchens at work. I ate a cookie or two and tucked the fortunes alongside those I’ve always stored in my wallet. At this point, I realized – oh yeah, I’ve always had this weird habit of tucking fortunes into my wallet. As I counted out the twenty or so slips of paper, I realized once again… oops…

I’ve thought about this for a few days and I’ve decided that I have far too many fortunes in my wallet. After all, if I didn't think about them when I needed fortunes to analyze, when will I ever think about them? It's time to cut down. So, over a few upcoming posts I’ll do a little spring cleaning on my wallet’s stash of fortunes and see if I can’t bring the number down to a more reasonable total. I’ll consider what the fortune means, run it through the TFR algorithm, and decide if it’s worth keeping in my wallet.

For today, let’s finish up with a look at that most recent fortune I referenced earlier.

Carry pieces of your childhood with you through life.

This is a great concept and one I touched on in the original post. I think it’s important to create little moments of nostalgia for myself so that I can remember where I came from and not lose touch with some of the most important aspects of my character. I also find it fitting that this message is on a fortune because I remember Chinese takeout as family time – we’d order a few items on a Saturday night, put on a movie, and chill out.

True, False, or Racist?

True – not every aspect of childhood should inform us in adulthood but I feel keeping in touch with our memories helps form a framework for leading a fulfilling life.

Keep it or chuck it?

Keep it.

leftovers - the 2018 toa awards – music (concert review)

Let’s take a moment today to look over the year in concerts.

Here’s the list of what I saw live in 2018:

U2 (June)
Lake Street Dive with Rubblebucket (July)
Arctic Monkeys (July)
Dispatch (September)
Chvrches (October)
Courtney Barnett (October)

Some scattered notes about these shows:

*The best concert venue from the list was Thompson’s Point in Portland, Maine. This was where Lake Street Dive closed for Rubblebucket and I recommend anyone who enjoys concerts to go here for at least one show. The grassy outdoor space is designed for a show on a perfect summer night and it created the ideal setting for a great concert.

*I didn’t leave the Arctic Monkeys show feeling the band would soon become one of my favorites. I enjoyed myself, of course, but I didn’t share the crowd’s rush of excitement and nostalgia every time the band started playing one of its bigger hits. I got the impression that the band’s newer material was not as well-liked by its core fans based on the different reactions of the crowd (what else is new?) and I confirmed this intuition when I started exploring more of their work in the weeks after the show. As I listened to more of their early work, I found myself getting more into the band’s original sound.

*I was never a big Dispatch fan but I liked the concert. It was at the Blue Hills Bank Pavillion in Boston’s seaport and this is another excellent concert venue. I realized during the show that the band’s best-known song, ‘The General’, is surely among the greatest songs ever and one people will still be listening to fifty years from now.

*The Chvrches show was outstanding and at times I wondered if their concert would cause the Orpheum Theater to burn to the ground. The band has a great stage presence and their performance energized the crowd throughout the night. I was surprised in particular by how much ‘Science/Visions’ and ‘Clearest Blue’ improved in concert and I was not disappointed by performances for the songs I was most looking forward to – ‘Graffiti’, ‘Get Out’, and ‘The Mother We Share’.

*The Courtney Barnett concert was another great show. I went the night after Chvrches and I couldn’t help but make comparisons. The most significant was that although Chvrches had a much better stage presence than Courtney, I thought her musicianship was breathtaking throughout the night. Of all the performers I saw this year, I thought Courtney Barnett playing the guitar was easily the most impressive display of skill and talent. I left the show more impressed by ‘Elevator Operator’ than ever before and thought her performance of ‘Depreston’ was the highlight of the evening.

*Last but not least, the first show I went to is also the one I have the most to say about. Initially, I had a lot more to say – I have a (long) draft for a post sitting around that I’m sure I’ll throw out tomorrow. It’s not that I want to spare you, dear reader, of my three thousand words about U2 – it’s that I just reread my draft and realized it was complete rubbish.

What I understood as I read my draft is that I went to U2 in June expecting much more than a concert yet in the end all I got was… a concert. I’d read in the past, for example, that seeing a U2 show was ‘like watching your life flash before your eyes’ and I recognized how U2 had formed a certain soundtrack in my life during difficult, unusual, or memorable times. I’d spent countless hours scouring Youtube for the most obscure concert clips imaginable and learned in the process that these concerts had the potential for much more than just a nice night listening to favorite music.

But in the end, I felt nothing of this sort during the show and left concluding that it was, indeed, just a concert. The band’s electric performance of ‘I Will Follow’ rolled back the decades while a stripped down version of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ underscored the band’s ability to find new ways of performing its oldest hits. I liked the acoustic performance of ‘Staring At The Sun’, a song the band linked to ‘willful blindness’ and used to state its position against the far right (headline: Bono, U2 against Nazis). In a night perhaps slightly overemphasizing new material, I enjoyed ‘Get Out Of Your Own Way’ and ‘Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way’ and I expect to count these among my favorite U2 songs for years to come. As my friend put it, U2 turned out to be ‘a couple hours of hard rocking’ and what I imagine were our completely different expectations led us to this same final point of agreement at the end of the set.

Overall, the show was simply incredible despite our terrible seats (second to last row, meaning we couldn't even get the benefit of being able to stand whenever we pleased). Of course, with U2 so much more goes into a great show than just the band members – I imagine more was spent on production than at all the other shows I went to this year combined – but it’s also impossible to put on great music without great musicians and that’s what you get anytime U2 comes to town. We would go back in an instant.

reading review - deep thinking (education)

Education is a topic I did not expect Garry Kasparov to discuss in Deep Thinking. However, I thought he made a couple of interesting comments about the matter in the context of how our ongoing shift toward machine intelligence will challenge education to make adjustments and I want to highlight those challenges today.

One observation I agreed with was that kids tend to learn much faster than allowed by traditional education methods. The ongoing process of information becoming increasingly available through new devices is an opportunity for educators to change their teaching methods and take advantage of this observation. If teachers can teach kids how to learn, it gives every student the freedom to learn at his or her own pace using the bounty of new tools and technologies at their fingertips.

The other thought I liked was how the next major innovation in education is likely to come from developing countries. This tends to be true for innovation in general – it comes from places that have no need to maintain a status quo (1). As education systems worldwide consider the ramifications of students having immediate access to all the answers, look for the best new questions to come from the countries that have no commitment to the questions they are asking of their students today.

Footnotes / money, money, money…

1. M-Pesa basically means texting money

This reminded me in a way of how M-Pesa is a popular way of transferring money in many countries yet it seems like Venmo is the closest equivalent we’ll ever have in the USA. The difference as it applies to the thought above is that Venmo does a better job of maintaining the status quo in the USA than M-Pesa because it leverages Paypal (an existing method of money transfer) rather than text messaging (which would be a new concept in the USA).

reading review - thinking in bets (analyzing outcomes)

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke (November 2018)

A critical skill for any decision maker is knowing how to analyze the outcome of a decision. This means a person must know how to weigh the importance of the factors that went into a decision and understand how each factor influenced the final observed outcome. This isn’t as simple as it sounds because most people are unable to overcome the biases in their own views or positions.

The most obvious way people do this is by interpreting events through filters that allow their analysis to remain consistent with prior conclusions. A person who believes people run faster in the sunlight, for example, will always consider weather conditions when assessing the outcome of a road race and might dismiss the presence of other more important variables. This tendency is natural and therefore somewhat unavoidable – plus, the difference between a bias and a variable is often a matter of openness to rethink. The issue isn’t necessarily the filter itself but our unwillingness to acknowledge when a filter is self-serving.

People who use their intelligence to construct narratives that explain away contradicting information compound this problem. Instead of recognizing a possible bias, these people construct ever more elaborate explanations that preserve their worldview. A good example might be the student who believes his or her failing test scores are first the fault of the questions, then the teacher – anyone but the student! In the context of Thinking In Bets, what these narratives prevent is the kind of open analysis required for cultivating an ongoing process of continuously improving a decision making process.

The way most people consider the roles of luck and skill in their outcomes undergoes a similar process. A poor analysis will involve seeking plausible reasons for an outcome that paints us in a flattering light. This usually means someone analyzing an outcome that had a lot more to do with luck than skill will explain the result with a series of characteristics or factors that are difficult to prove – character, toughness, perseverance, and so on. As stated a couple of times above, the key to overcoming this flaw in the way we naturally assess outcomes is to be aware of how our explanations serve our interests, positions, or worldviews and to question any conclusion that paints us in too flattering a light.

One up: Of course, I fail to acknowledge above how difficult it is to analyze outcomes without bias. My guess is that although some people can come pretty close to being entirely without bias in their individual analysis, no one out there is above benefiting from a little help. Duke cites research that two people will often move closer together on an issue after a debate or skilled explanation of the opposing position and leveraging the wisdom of this finding is one way to strip away bias in an analysis. A good start toward this goal might be to find a trustworthy partner or form a diverse group that will always find ways to play Devil’s advocate and explore the many possible factors involved in a certain outcome.

One down: My adventures in business and analytics often bring me across KPI – key performance indicators. This magical-sounding concept is a way to proactively track important outcomes. The methodology for calculating these metrics ranges from the simple to the complex. The important thing isn’t the difficulty level of the math but rather what the metrics reveal about performance.

Now, though helpful in many ways, one significant danger of a KPI is how it encourages lazy outcome analysis. Even if a truth about a KPI is well established – for example, when everyone agrees that if ‘X’ goes down, it’s because ‘Y’ went up – someone should investigate the underlying causes of why the metric moved as it always did. The teams and organizations that can maintain a fresh perspective to data they’ve seen before will always do well while those who glance at the outcome before moving on will someday find themselves blindsided by the unexpected.

Just saying: I liked the thought that a good scientist should report everything that might make his or her findings invalid. It really captures the essence of this book – no individual is infallible to certain reasoning errors, so we must do everything in our power to leverage different perspectives and make it easy for our peers or colleagues to check our thinking.

reading review - deep thinking (competition)

Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking examines the progress being made in the world of computing and considers how these advancements will alter the course of the human race. It’s a compelling read because of Kasparov’s significant experiences within the field and I’ve noted a few of his insights in recent posts.

However, today I want to focus on a different aspect of his book – competition. As a former world chess champion, Kasparov is in some ways uniquely positioned to discuss the nuances of competition and I thought many of his comments reflected a deep understanding of the competitor’s mindset.

One of Kasparov’s main strategies in any match was to prevent the opponent from playing to his, her, or – in the case of IBM’s Deep Blue, its – strengths. This is a concept I’ve heard echoed over the years by competitors in all manners of fields. Michael Lombardi describes this in the context of helmet football as making right-handed opponents play ‘left-handed’ while Paul Graham has written that small companies can beat larger companies if they make their bulkier competitors ‘run uphill’. What Kasparov’s writing lacked in colorful analogies was more than made up for by direct tactical recommendations – if an opponent was good with the bishops, he would congest the center to reduce the possibility of diagonal movements.

This thought leads naturally to its inverse – a good player cannot maintain success unless there is constant variation in play. A good player becomes a great player by becoming unpredictable because an opponent cannot easily identify which strengths to nullify. To recycle the above example in this context, the strategy of nullifying or removing the bishops is less effective if the opponent is comfortable playing a closed game that emphasizes the knights.

A strong competitor also understands the difference between a true weakness and a theoretical weakness. A good player either wastes training time by futilely working on all weaknesses or takes no action to protect against having weaknesses exploited by crafty opponents. Such a player’s discomfort with weakness means too much or too little preparation time is spent considering how to best prevent weaknesses from leading to a defeat. A great player understands that a theoretical weakness is irrelevant if an opponent cannot exploit it and only worries about the true weaknesses that an opponent is able to take advantage of during competition.

The observation I liked the most was that some competitors make for better challengers than they do champions. There are undoubtedly many explanations for this – perhaps some will cite the ‘underdog mentality’, which at the very least makes for a nice newspaper story. But the explanation I like the most takes a slightly different angle – when winners credit their own good play ahead of their opponent’s poor play, success can be the enemy of future success. Although this isn’t necessarily how every new champion views the accomplishment, I suspect the ones who do struggle to remain at the top are at some level too convinced of their own superiority to treat challengers with the same respect that they once gave to the champions they worked tirelessly to dethrone.

the quota method

Over the past few weeks, I had a couple of experiences that made me think back to the post about my 2017 reading list, ‘Hello Ladies’. The first came after I attended a presentation at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about how to use hiring practices as a means for improving an organization’s diversity. The second was due to a discussion from a Left, Right, and Center podcast episode that debated the role a consumer played in supporting an artist’s work. These two experiences brought me back to the central question left in my mind after those ‘Hello Ladies’ posts – what is the best way to balance the types of authors represented in my reading list?

One possible method is to split my reading list down the middle ahead of time, fifty-fifty, and alternate books by male and female authors. Let’s call this The Quota Method. There are a couple of obvious benefits in this approach. First, it won’t change the quality of my reading – at this moment in 2019, there are simply too many excellent books out there that alternating from one subset of authors to another won’t rule out the possibility that I can find a great read. This approach is also easily adaptable to a more expanded interpretation – I could commit to an annual reading list whose authors appear in direct proportion to that of the global demographic distribution. If my math is correct, one out of every twenty thousand books would be from an Icelandic author – what a way to spend my 270th birthday!

Of course, underlying that joke is the hidden problem of any quota – the method rules out certain great candidates by arbitrarily restricting the number of available positions. If Icelandic authors produced two great works, I would need to finish at least twenty thousand books before I could consider reading them both! This is the problem of the quota method – by taking an aggregate view of a series of decisions, it removes the possibility of getting the most value out of each individual decision. It means that instead of a reading list full of the books I decided were the best ones to read next out of all the available books, I instead chose to pick the best one out of subset A, then subset B, and so on, hoping that at the end I divided my subsets intelligently enough to produce a desired balance without sacrificing quality.

In some ways, picking a book to read next isn't so much different from hiring. In process terms, I want to get a list of candidates, learn a little bit about each, and determine the best available book to read next. And as I was in the case of my reading list, many organizations are surprised when they look at their hiring decisions in aggregate and discover a lack of diversity within their workplaces. The last part is perhaps the most intriguing part of this comparison - although I remain interested in finding ways to improve on the clumsy diversity metrics I calculated for my reading list, I am much like these organizations in how I share their reluctance to implement the only surefire way of accomplishing such an objective - a quota.

This reluctance is explainable by the incompatibility I noted above between isolated hiring decisions and the statistics used to measure those decisions in aggregate. Ask any hiring manager in the world what the goal of a hiring decision is and the answer will always be the same - to find the best person for the job. If the best candidate for a given job is equally likely to come from any non-performance based subset of the candidate pool – which is the underlying assumption of the diversity argument – then arbitrarily ruling out one subset or another will unambiguously make it less likely that the given hiring process will find the best candidate for the job. The Quota Method simply doesn't apply whenever the goal of the incremental decision is to make the best possible choice in the context of that decision alone.

But if we do not consider the aggregate metric at the time of the decision, what methods are available to help organizations reach their diversity goals? I referenced at the start that all of this thinking was a result of two recent moments, two anecdotes, and I think these anecdotes both reinforce the challenge of dealing with thorny aggregates while also pointing to the possibilities inherent in continuing to look at the problem from fresh perspectives.

The first moment was this presentation at the conference, a thoroughly researched and expertly prepared talk that covered everything I was interested in except for the one question I never hear addressed in a diversity conversation – what exactly constitutes ‘diversity’ for an organization, anyway? Let me take a crack at it. One perfectly reasonable definition is to match the demographics of the office’s home city. If this approach were applied to Boston, we would consider offices with 54% white employees as having 'average diversity' and an organization claiming itself as 'diverse' would have to match this number at the minimum. A similar alternative presented itself to me during a recent phone interview. The recruiter mentioned during our conversation that his organization regularly recruited from my alma mater, Colby, because of its strong academic record. Let's suppose we extend this comment and define diversity as matching the demographics of the average applicant's alma mater. If we use Colby as a simple proxy, we'd see that Colby’s student body is 62% white and would therefore describe an office with 62% white employees as having 'average diversity' - again, an organization claiming itself as 'diverse' would have to match this number at the minimum (1).

The roundabout point here is that if organizations don't bother defining 'diversity', they risk becoming a victim of someone else's bias. It doesn't matter whether their own process is fair or not because they won't know how to identify a biased applicant pool. It's kind of like cleaning your drinking glass to ease concerns about water contamination - it's well intended, but knowing how to identify dirty water is a much safer approach.

The unwillingness to define a diversity goal is admittedly odd to me when I consider the question from another angle - in an age when there seems to be a number for any measurable concept, why can't I find a single number out there from any company that says "this is our ideal demographic breakdown, and here's where we stack up at the moment"? I work for a company that reminds me ten different ways a day that we are data driven yet there isn't a single example I can recall where someone from my company said "this is our ideal demographic breakdown, and here's where we stack up at the moment". Why is diversity the only exception for our data driven approach?

I’m not trying to point fingers at any institution or organization. I believe everyone involved in any selection process is trying their best to overcome the various biases associated with such work. I’m certainly no better than anyone in this regard as evidenced by the breakdown of my reading list in the ‘Hello Ladies’ series. The point I’m making here is that the diversity discussion might prove more productive if the focus shifted from setting vague principles based on generally accepted truths – more diversity because diversity good – to determining the underlying inertia that prevents such a goal from being reached naturally – since we cannot accurately measure performance, we hire using secondary criteria like references, alma mater, or in-person interview performance. Like I noted above, there are some very good reasons to avoid The Quota Method as the sole criteria for making a decision. However, defining the ideal aggregate ahead of time is a good way to know when the incremental selection decisions are taking the team off the intended path and such a signal can prompt additional review of the applicant pools for any previously unseen bias.

Two years ago, I thought I made progress toward this goal when I broke down my reading list. As I noted in the series, I learned that the publishing industry tends to print more work from female authors than from their male counterparts yet male authors receive a disproportionate share of publicity. Given the important role publicity plays in how I choose the next book I read – I can only read the books I know about – I recognized the importance of finding unbiased sources from which I could freely accept reading recommendations. My most recent annual reading list didn't reflect much change in my overall results, however, so I know I need to do a little more. It's obvious that I must continue thinking about the bias built into my sources but I must also identify ways to adjust my reading selections whenever I'm waist-deep in a biased pool of new recommendations.

One approach I've implemented for 2019 is to no longer read books written by men if the only way I learned about it was from a bookstore display case. I made this adjustment for two reasons. First, I know that display cases are biased 'applicant pools' in my book selection process and therefore might over-publicize books by men at the expense of books of equal quality by women. Second, I've learned over the past couple of years that if a male author makes it into a display case and that book turns out to be any good, I'll eventually learn of it anyway from the many other sources of book recommendations in my life such as blogs, podcasts, or my social circles.

This brings me to the second moment I alluded to earlier – the podcast episode that discussed the consumer’s role in supporting an artist’s work. The podcast made me think about this lingering idea from the ‘Hello Ladies’ project because of its implication that what we support today makes the foundation for what lives on tomorrow. It's for this reason that making adjustments to how I pick the next book I read is important in a broader context. Last year, I signaled to the library that sixty percent of the books I read are written by men. How does that influence the way the library makes marginal decisions about what books to bring into its collection for next year? If my choices matter at all, there's only one plausible answer.

Anytime sixty percent of the books I borrow are written by men, I send a signal that in the future sixty percent of the books I borrow will be written by men. The only way to change such a signal is to change the way I send such a signal. And the only way I'll ever know if I'm sending the intended signal is to study what I've done in the past and make adjustments to ensure different results in the future. This strikes me as the right approach for resolving any multilayered bias problem but it's impossible to make progress without clearly defining the right goal. A new future is built just like anything else – the key step is always to set the right foundation, but there's no way to do this without first defining the vision.

Footnotes / endnotes / another needless potshot?

0. Have I ever referenced this book before?

I originally wanted to work this idea in from Michael Lewis's Moneyball:

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

1. Originally, this post was less serious, and I had more quips like this...

My hypothetical approaches to measuring diversity have their own set of problems. The city demographic idea is cute, I think, but we all know Boston isn't exactly new to allegations of racism. Should any company settle for merely matching the city's demographics? Can a diverse company emerge if it hires exclusively from such a city?

And if we agree that the best possible job candidates tend to graduate from our most prestigious institutions, then how should we consider Harvard's position as the defendant in a recent lawsuit alleging discrimination against Asian applicants in its admissions process? Should any company settle for merely matching the demographics of institutions coming under such scrutiny? Can a diverse company emerge if it hires exclusively from pools that discriminate at the point of admission?

reading review - deep thinking (change, progress, and innovation)

One of the major themes in Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking was the way society struggles to find the right pace for change. It’s a struggle most noticeable anytime we lament technology taking on our work – in other words, it is a constant and ever-present protest about what has been among the most basic and repeated stories from the history of civilization.

Perhaps this speaks to the mere power of the status quo, especially for those who would benefit from keeping things unchanged. As Kasparov points out, a gravedigger would have selfish reasons for worrying about new breakthroughs in medicine just as a mosquito net manufacturer surely does better business in the absence of a malaria cure. There is also a good example from the book about how the status quo can excuse us from facing a certain fear – until a 1945 work stoppage by elevator operators forced many to scale skyscrapers by foot, the general mood in society was apprehensive toward riding in an elevator alone. Therefore, the last true obstacle to the full adoption of automatic elevators was the public's reluctance to make the change.

The right pace for change is a dilemma that defines the implementation of any new innovation. The four decades it took for automatic elevators to catch on is perhaps a bit long in hindsight but there is always good reason to be skeptical about how much can change right away. There is a reality Bill Gates once pointed out that applies to almost all new technologies - progress forecasts for the first couple of years are almost always exaggerated while the potential benefits of what might happen as new users adopt the technology are rarely given full weight. The struggle between idea and breakthrough then is finding the balance between the champions who overestimate short-term progress and the opponents who underestimate the long-term gains.

Of course, moving slowly isn’t a guarantee of anything. Those who only rely on optimization to bring on improvement can obscure the need for a more thorough rebuilding or rewriting of the existing method. If the rate of change is too slow, the potential of creation through destruction is exchanged for the surefire but perhaps limited improvements that might come about from a committed optimization method – evolution is, after all, merely change, and no guarantee of improvement.

reading review - skin in the game (recurring risk)

In a couple of my posts about Skin in the Game, I referenced the importance of differentiating between contagious risk and independent risk. Today, I wanted to look at a similar idea – recurring risk – because I feel it represents one of the most significant themes in the book.

Let’s start with a common piece of investment wisdom that I’ve passed along myself once or twice around these parts – the magical index fund. The basic theory is simple – an investor who buys an index fund will earn matching returns to the market. And since the market tends to generate positive returns over time, such an investor is almost sure to do well over a long period. In fact, if the investment is made over several decades, the index fund basically ensures the best possible balance of low risk and high return.

Sounds good, right? There is a catch, of course, and this is where recurring risk comes in. If an investor remains in the market for a long enough time, there will eventually be a rough period or two. The only way an investor will not earn a matching return to the market is if these losses force a reduction in market position. This might not sound like such a problem at the time the investment is made and it is easy to resolve austerity in the future (if times get tough, I’ll tighten the belt elsewhere without touching the investment) but this stance overlooks the strong likelihood that tough times will go hand-in-hand with a declining market. It’s hard enough to invest money during a good economy – when the economy slows down (or even goes into a recession) it becomes even harder to justify putting money aside when it might be needed for more urgent short term purchases.

An investment survives if the investor limits exposure to risk so that losses do not lead to a reduction in position. Therefore, the longer the time horizon for the investment, the more important it is to consider exposure to risk. Otherwise, the investment is sure to give way at some point to a short-term cash need resulting from one of the many ‘unexpected’ personal finance crises that emerge over the course of several decades. To put it in more general terms, survival means being able to hold a position in the face of volatility.

The math behind this line of thinking suggests that in terms of probabilities the relationship between risk, volatility, and time are roughly equivalent. An investment with a small risk of major losses – let’s say 1% – likely generates a small positive return most of the time. However, since investors generally hold their positions in the case of any small positive return, then this strategy is the equivalent of saying – I won’t make a decision about my position until I suffer a major loss. How confident are you going to be in your position if the most recent event was the biggest financial loss of your life? Put this together with the likelihood that these losses tend to coincide with economic downturns, slowdowns, or crashes (and all the short term financial pressure these events create) and you can begin to see why it is far more difficult than advertised to earn a matching return to the market.

When an investor is unable to hold a position no matter what, then in a probabilistic sense the strategy over time is roughly equivalent to being a guaranteed failure. In layman terms, this is like walking into a casino, betting it all on red, and resolving to continue putting all your winnings on red until you are wiped out. It might not happen right away, but no matter how you spin it it’s only a matter of time.

reading review - deep thinking

Deep Thinking by Gary Kasparov (July 2018)

Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov explores the history, progress, and implications of machine intelligence in his 2017 book. Deep Thinking covers a wide range of topics related to the idea and I’ll cover some of Kasparov’s varied insights in a series of upcoming posts. However, for today I want to cover the section of the book he devoted to the chess matches he played during the 1990’s against a number of chess computers.

The most famous of these matches, of course, was against IBM’s Deep Blue. The machine quickly progressed during the decade from being a technically impressive but unthreatening imitation of an elite chess player to a true challenger against the world’s best player. The machine finally broke through in 1997 by beating Kasparov in the first game of their six-game match. A year later, it made history by beating Kasaprov in the rematch.

The progress made by the program illustrates many of the important principles that govern machine progress. One example is Moravec’s paradox. This points out that humans are bad at what machines do well while machines are good at what humans do poorly. This suggests that a machine in competition with a human will win as long as it can fully take advantage of its superior processing power. In the chess context, a machine can make up for its shortcomings in strategic planning and patter recognition by analyzing positions at a depth far beyond the ability of a human player. Early programmers of chess machines struggled with this trade-off by focusing too much on teaching the machine to ‘think’ like a human. Over time, as computer speed steadily improved and processing power dramatically increased, the focus of chess machines turned to using brute force to analyze as many positions as possible instead of trying to ‘think’ through a position.

To put this point in another way, machines have historically failed to ‘think’ like humans because the way humans think is not understood well enough to turn into a computer program. The solution for designers has always been to prioritize results over method instead. In the context of chess, the breakthrough came when the programs started to focus on calculation rather than thinking.

It helped computers that chess is simply not complex enough to require a computer to ‘think’ – brute force methods were enough to determine the best play. There is no better example of the power of extensive tactical search than in situations with low margins for error. A human in this situation will almost always make an error at some point because he or she cannot rely on intuition, principles, or experience to guide the thought process. A human might also feel pressure, nerves, or emotions that influence bad decisions. On the other hand, a computer is unaffected by feelings and can navigate such situations with the same process it uses for common positions.

A human, however, is often better equipped to navigate new or novel positions. In these moments, understanding the basic principles of the game and playing the board based on intuition works better than brute force calculations. This is a reality reflected not just on the chessboard but also in any domain where machines are prevalent. In short, automated equipment simply isn’t very flexible and humans in competition with machines can win if they can introduce uncertain elements onto the playing field whenever possible.

One up: I liked the observation that airplanes don’t flap their wings to fly. It makes the point that machine success isn’t dependent on following the blueprints set by living things and I suspect this lesson is likely to hold true even as computers continue to expand and build on the early foundations of artificial intelligence.

One down: One common form of machine learning involves feeding a computer endless examples of a desired behavior. Over time, the computer learns what a correct result looks like and tries to mimic these results with its decisions. In chess, this can lead to weird results – a computer might think queen sacrifices are a good idea in general, for example, when in reality a player only sacrifices a queen when he or she has an exceedingly good reason to do so.

The logic of this method must be applied carefully because the way this lesson applies to other situations can lead to very poor ‘automated’ decision making. A computer learning to drive in this manner, for example, might observe driving behavior and conclude that a green light means go, a red light means stop, and a yellow light means… accelerate through the intersection!

Just saying: I thought no point summarized the chess portion of this book better than the observation that computer programs are better at using knights than their human opponents. The reason is two-fold. First, humans struggle to visualize the crooked movement of a knight with the same ease they visualize the linear movements of the other pieces.

I liked the second reason a little better – computers do not struggle with this visualization because computers don’t visualize anything. I think this point is easily lost whenever people try to think about how computers make calculations. It isn’t really a question of how the computer ‘visualizes’ the problem because a visualization is always a substitute for rigorous calculation. A computer doesn’t need to visualize because it is almost always capable of completing the full series of calculations.

leftovers - the 2018 toa awards – music (2019 preview)

With the awards for my 2018 in music all set and handed out, let’s clean off the old crystal ball and see what’s in store for 2019.

At the time of writing (January 2019) I’m slated to attend two concerts. The first is Rubblebucket in just a week’s time with the second being Muse’s show in April. I’ve seen both groups before and although I am excited for the shows I don’t expect either one to drastically change the way I assess these bands. My guess is I’ll end up at a couple more shows this year but I’m struggling at the moment to pick out any bands that might announce a tour date for the end of the year (except for Lake Street Dive, who are perpetually touring). I would automatically go to see Of Monsters and Men but there isn’t any indication that the band will exist in 2019. I suppose since I value live performances so much in my music that I should consider dropping in on a few more shows at semi-random but those by definition would be impossible to predict within the premise of this post.

My expectation of a relatively slow concert year creates an interesting situation for the band of the year award given how important a live show has been in the past couple years of the award. I’m guessing the 2019 winner will be a repeat of a prior champion and that the shortlist will include no surprises. The most improved award is always pointless to predict and speculation about the lifetime achievement award is logically inconsistent – if I know about it now, why not just award it immediately?

The most interesting award category is the rookie of the year. As I glide into my thirties – The Middle Ages – I find it increasingly unlikely that I will continue to find a new artist or band I really like every year. At some point in the future, I’m sure this award will remain vacant as I confirm the fossilization of my musical preferences. However, this may not be the case for 2019 because at the time of writing I already have a solid candidate for next year – Kurt Vile. It helps him that I’m already familiar with him thanks to his collaboration with Courtney Barnett, Lotta See Lice, and I’ve found so far in 2019 that his solo work contains a couple of songs I can’t stop replaying. It’s a long year ahead and a lot can happen but for now, the title is Kurt’s to lose.

reading review - skin in the game (the smart businessman)

One of the big questions I’ve wrestled with over the past few years is the appropriate value to place on someone’s education in the context of success. When someone succeeds, is it right to immediately credit their education? Or is there more to success than someone’s diplomas?

In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a strong argument that in the context of business success people generally place too much value on education. For him, smart people sometimes turn the attitude they’ve developed through education into obstacles for their own success. This is because an educated person is accustomed to understanding and explaining ideas before getting any form of validation for their work. If understanding must come before application, the educated person might miss an idea that others with less education will jump on right away simply because the educated person will wait until understanding the idea before taking initiative.

A version of the above that Taleb cites is how educated people tend to shy away from ideas they perceive as stupid. He notes that smart people fail in business if their tendency to dismiss or merely criticize what they do not understand prevents them from ever recognizing that if something they perceive as stupid still works (as in, makes money) it cannot actually be stupid (from a business perspective, at least, and within a reasonable time period). At the very least, it cannot have been stupid, given how the goal in business is to make money and the so-called 'stupid' idea made money.

Taleb goes on to further consider the implications of how education nudges students toward explanation rather than action. When such people get into business, are they more likely to try anything just to see what works or are they more likely to try the small handful of things they are able to explain? Although there is no perfect approach, it is difficult to think of successful businesses that followed the blueprint its very smart founders drew up one day one.

The business context Taleb uses to consider the importance of education helped me think more deeply about my own question. The kind of intelligence emphasized through education requires understanding before application. The academically successful graduate who goes into business would surely want to apply this skill in the real world. But in business, sometimes things work before anyone understands it. It brings to mind an ironic scene – someone demanding data to help him or her explain the success behind a young initiative while ignoring the fact that the success itself is perhaps the most relevant data point during the early days.

Instead of worrying so much about explaining, perhaps the best approach is to consider how to mitigate the effects of failure. The ‘stupid idea’ that succeeds wildly should be studied and understood, of course, but that doesn’t mean the best thing to do is to stop leveraging the idea until an acceptable narrative is written. Instead, the business should think of ways to put safety nets in place so that if the idea suddenly does start to fail it won’t put everyone out of a job. In fact, this is what businesses should be doing all the time – putting safety nets in place to reduce the impact of errors – because this encourages employees to try new things and learn quickly from mistakes. In such an environment, it is only a matter of time before someone will make a significant discovery.

Footnotes / endnote, really / must everything tie back to politics?

0. But didn’t one of their own get elected?

Though Taleb generally steers clear of politics in this book, he does chime in with the occasional thought. He defines the concept of the educated philistine along these lines, saying that this type of person criticizes decisions others wouldn’t have made if they were smarter. Such a person may, for example, label someone who votes counter to an educated person’s preference as a ‘populist’.

leftovers - the pillow book

I was left with two extra thoughts about Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book.

First, I concluded the post by noting that I noticed a trace of disappointment in some parts of the book. This is a hunch from an unqualified observer and nothing more. I suppose I should point to some examples from the book to support my position, no? One thought that caught my eye was her note that few moments are more dispiriting than when someone other than the expected person arrives - to me, I read into that expression a learned familiarity with disappointment.

However, it isn’t perfectly fair to jump to a conclusion about someone’s mental or emotional state just because of his or her writing. Shonagon was a talented writer and observer, a fact confirmed throughout The Pillow Book, and perhaps these moments I read into were merely nothing more than additional demonstrations of her significant ability to relate the truth we all experience beneath our polished, composed, and contented exteriors.

The second leftover thought is brief but significant for how it extends her influence over a millenia into the future. Shonagon wraps up the book by recommending we all learn to write about the things we find impressive, delightful, or moving. It is great advice for anyone, I think, but as with any list of three I find myself in agreement with one item in particular among the group.

the running dynasties (part IV)

My full return from the injury that ended my third running dynasty was a gradual process. At first, I struggled to run ten minutes pain-free. Slowly, the strength came back into my legs. In April, I was able to get through a basketball game without a problem by controlling my acceleration and limiting my pace. In May, I was completing short runs as I described last week. At the end of the month, I put myself to the test and managed to get through twenty miles of running over thirty-six hours for a pointless relay race I’d committed to in the winter - even though I ran at half-speed on the last two legs, I made it to the end. By June, I was locked into a regular morning running routine. I wasn’t quite back but I was trending in the right direction in my new role as a morning runner.

The Fourth Running Dynasty: July 2015 – March 2018

Start reason: Recovery from prior injury
End reason: Applying lessons learned three years ago

July proved influential to the start of my next dynasty. It wasn’t just that my mom died in hospice, it was more that I’d spent some good time with her there and had the chance to talk about some things. The conversation I remember most vividly came one afternoon when I’d asked her if she ever dreamed of anything. She said she did, that in fact the night before she had dreamed about running.

This exchange must have had some effect on me.

At the end of June, my conclusion was that running a short distance a few days a week was a good balance for my physical and emotional health. By the end of July, my reasoning had changed slightly, perhaps not to the self-destructive heights of the prior winter, but more like a decision that I should defer changes to my running mentality until I was sure I’d run myself into the ground.

To put this another way, although I'd just learned that I was using running as a way to manage my mood - and should therefore prioritize remaining injury-free until I was feeling better - I decided instead to risk injury by just running as much as possible. I suppose I can relate in some odd way to those who become addicted to painkillers - if I feel better after running five miles, why not run every day? And wouldn't I feel even better if I ran ten miles a day?

Looking back, I see that I went from a morning runner to a mourning runner, likely at some point in August. The difference between this time and my prior dynasty was that I wasn’t restricting my long runs to just the weekend afternoons - I was also getting out on weekdays, and in the early mornings, and late at night. My longest runs never set personal records but the increased frequency really ran up my weekly mileage. I went from the almost entirely weekend-driven twenty to twenty-five miles a week to between thirty and forty miles a week spread out over seven days. I’d thought I’d used running in the past to pull me through emotional lows and establish a sense of stability. However, a closer look at this dynasty makes any past efforts look feeble in comparison. It just got worse after I lost my job and the situation continued to deteriorate the longer I remained unemployed.

I eventually set aside my misery just long enough to fill out an application for a volunteer role at a local hospice. My application was met with some initial skepticism. It was nothing personal. The response was based on a simple observation that life was a list of risk factors for major depression – death of a parent, sudden job loss, extended unemployment – and such people historically did very poorly in the volunteer role. I pushed on because I thought such risk factors were outside my control and therefore should be ignored. Plus, I was doing the best I could by relying on what worked in the past – running – to help me work through this time.

Unfortunately, my running was introducing a possible fourth risk factor into the equation - chronic injury. This risk increased every time I pushed through discomfort or pain during a run but I wasn't doing anything about it. I suppose the problem was in the trade-off – I could stop running and feel better physically, but how would I regulate my mood? I didn’t know, so I kept running, perhaps motivated by a vague notion that I would figure it out, and slowly the foot pain I was running through started to bother me when I wasn’t running.

I list March 2018 as the end of the dynasty but it's not easy to pinpoint the exact moment I decided to slow down. It would make for a good conclusion to this story that I started to feel better about things in general and decided that I was ready to consider running less. I can’t say for sure when I turned the proverbial corner, though, so I think a more truthful story is that I acknowledged my foot pain as a problem to solve rather than a problem to tolerate, perhaps because the positive experience of running was now being outweighed by the negative experience of the injured foot.

It was a long process - first, I tried making some basic changes to my footwear so that I could keep running while I solved the problem. Initially, I did see some sporadic improvement in my feet. Unfortunately, this didn’t prove a consistent solution and my running performance soon resume its decline. At some point, my response changed - instead of pushing through, I slowed down. For whatever reason, I'd decided to acknowledge my body’s signals. I could never have done this back when I felt I needed to run for so much more than just mileage.

My decision around a year ago to take a break from running was a difficult decision to make. It was the first time I’ve ever stopped running despite being able to run. And although my break lasted only a month, it was still a difficult time for me. As I look back on my running history as a whole, however, I feel much better about that decision to take a break. Like with each time I’ve stopped running in the past, the end of a dynasty left me with important knowledge about myself – that I valued my place on the basketball team, that change is a way to unlock my potential, that stability comes from regularly giving it all. The lesson from the fourth dynasty was subtler but it left me with perhaps the most valuable perspective yet – no matter how far I go or how hard I run, at some point I have to come back and deal with the things I’d left behind.

reading review - skin in the game (presentation and public appearance)

A consistent theme of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work is the distorting effect caused by appearance. His recently released Skin in the Game was no exception and I’ve noted a number of my favorite insights on this topic in today’s post.

First, Taleb warns the reader about people who are very easily understood when explaining a complicated idea, task or process – although these people appear knowledgeable, they are very likely bullshitting to some degree. This thought does not deny that there are great teachers capable of simplifying difficult concepts. Rather, it acknowledges that certain ideas require a degree of hard work to understand and cautions against looking for the magic bullets that appear to make this effort unnecessary.

A similar thought explores the role of outward appearances in ‘fake work’. For Taleb, criticism of presentation is a clear signal of ‘fake work’ and the more presentation is emphasized the less likely it is that the underlying idea is well understood (1). This belief perhaps explains why he feels a successful person who doesn’t quite look the part might have a richer set of skills than someone whose success is explainable by associations with certain 'appearances' - a well-groomed manner of presentation, other successful people, prestigious institutions. A person who sends no outward signals of success suggests that at the very least this person has demonstrated an ability to overcome certain entrenched prejudices or preferences in a given field to achieve success.

Footnotes / another Paul Graham reference?

1. Am I wrong?

It reminds me of an idea from this Paul Graham essay – "If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it." The implication here is that since the worst thing anyone can say about an idea is that it’s wrong, criticizing an idea along any other criteria suggests at the minimum that there is some merit to the underlying thought.

the 2018 toa awards – music

Hi all,

Welcome to the 2018 edition of the TOA Music Awards - or as it is more commonly known, the most self-indulgent post of the year!

As I’ve done in the past, I’ll hand out a number of irrelevant honors to various bands and artists in today’s opening post before following up over the next few weeks with some leftover thoughts on songs, concerts, and the year ahead. I liked how the format from last year’s awards held up when I revisited it in preparation for this post so we’ll just run it back this year and see where that takes us. Those interested in past winners should refer to the footnotes.

Without further ado, then…

Rookie of the Year – Arctic Monkeys

I've noted in the past that a good way to predict whether I’ll like a band requires understanding some basic criteria. First, is the band a strong live performer? Second, can the band cover a song? And third, does the lead singer have an unusual voice within the genre? I went to see the Arctic Monkeys perform in July and found that they easily passed muster as it related to all of these questions. The rest of the year was spent catching up to a lot of their live performances on Youtube and I’ve found about ten to fifteen songs I like (which is around the average for me if I like a group). I’m a little late to the party with this group given that they’ve been fairly relevant for over a decade but in hindsight it seems like it was just a matter of when, not if.

Becoming an Arctic Monkeys fan introduces a couple of bizarre and pointless observations. First, this Sheffield-based band isn’t even my favorite group from England’s Steel City – that pointless honor remains with Slow Club (though I suppose the defunct two-piece is now officially under threat). And second, this isn’t the first band I’ve gotten into after showing up to a concert – that distinction remains with Rubblebucket, a band I’ve gone to see a few times since my initial introduction to them when they opened for Lake Street Dive.

Most Improved – Muse (Arcade Fire, The Killers)

This was a three-way race defined more by a lack of strong candidates than it was a significant change in the way I considered these groups. I had essentially written off Arcade Fire at this time last year but I found in 2018 that I was pleasantly surprised when I dug into the archives for some of their older concerts. The Killers made it into the shortlist solely on the power of their various cover performances that I enjoyed exploring over the past year.

In the end, it had to be Muse. They released their 9th album, Simulation Theory, and although it won’t go down in history as my favorite album I liked a number of the songs and their corresponding early live performances. It also prompted me to dig back into the archives for some of their songs I’d never paid close attention to – ‘Butterflies and Hurricanes’, ‘Neutron Star Collison’, and ‘Thoughts of a Dying Atheist’ foremost among them. The opportunity to explore Muse’s work, whether it was new or just new to me, made it a good year for the band in my esteem and propelled them upward in my internal rankings. I’m looking forward to their next show in Boston.

Before moving on, I’d like to point out that one of the best parts of being a longtime fan of any band is the opportunity to see how all the reviews that come out with each new album start egging each other on to produce an increasingly ridiculous narrative about a group. The current Muse narrative is that it's officially uncool to like them (Muse, meet U2), my favorite thought along these lines being from NME – you won’t want to admit you liked (the new album). What sorry lives the readers of NME must lead! I’ll admit here that I did like it, and that I encourage all TOA readers to admit what they like, unless they wish to become qualified to review albums from aging rock bands for their local newspaper.

Lifetime Achievement – T.I.

I’m still working out what exactly it means to win a TOA Lifetime Achievement Award. For now, I’m reserving it for groups or artists that I’m grateful to for contributions to my life yet have no expectations for in terms of further contributions. The explanation isn’t very succinct or even helpful but it does accurately describe how I feel about T.I., my favorite rapper. I think although I’ve always liked rap, at this moment it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever become a loyal fan of the genre.

I’ve written about T.I. on TOA before in the context of his appearance on VH1’s Storytellers series. This show encouraged artists to talk about the stories and inspirations that went into their work before performing those songs in front of an intimate studio audience. Though I enjoyed his entire performance, the segment about ‘No Matter What’ always moved me. T.I. talks about feeling isolated and betrayed when those who once stood close by his side suddenly disappeared as his success was interrupted by a period of difficulty and crisis. He then explains how this challenged and motivated him to grow as an artist by creating something a little different – as he put it, he couldn’t use this as an excuse for writing another ‘ghetto anthem’. Instead, he dug deep into himself to understand what drove him and poured his energy into creating ‘No Matter What’.

This track remains one of my favorite songs. I like it because it’s a good rap song, of course, but also because I relate to the intensity of its hurt, defiance, and confidence. Of course, I also have no doubt that T.I.’s speech on Storytellers played a huge role in my feelings about the song. It was, in essence, a two minute dissertation about creating art, and it was the first such explanation I’d ever heard in my life. In short, every time I hear ‘No Matter What’, I’m reminded that the depths of failure, disappointment, and despair isn’t a place to where we fall but a place where we make ourselves comfortable until we are ready to start scaling the mountain once more.

TOA Band of the Year – Chvrches (U2, Lake Street Dive)

I considered more groups than usual for this honor but ending up finding easy reasons to cross them off during my preliminary deliberations. Courtney Barnett and Arctic Monkeys were both boosted by concerts late in the year but these shows were not enough to make up for the time I spent mostly ignoring them in the first half of the year. I liked 2011 champion Muse and 2015 winner Lake Street Dive’s new albums but neither record captured my imagination in the same way of past releases.

Ultimately, I found myself with the two-horse race I sort of predicted in last year’s awards. The U2 concert in June was a highlight of the year and I did think the ancient rock band was headed for top honors as I walked into the Orpheum Theater in late October for the Chvrches show. However, Chvrches’s electric performance combined with a consistent year of finding good live performances on Youtube helped me conclude that on balance this Scottish synth-pop group did more for me this year than did any other in my musical rotation.

For a band that I described in November as ‘the band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would have become if they’d paid their electric bill’, Chvrches is showing some surprising promise with their unplugged work. I found many excellent acoustic performances from the group this year that suggest they are more than a temporary blip on my musical radar. They will be challenged like any other group to innovate within their strengths and, perhaps more importantly, stay together, but if they can keep their focus I think I’ll probably have some more to say about them at this time next year.

Footnotes / well, endnotes…

0. My updated award list...

Folks, as promised, here’s the full list. Readers should note that The Band of the Year is the only award I did retroactively (up to 2016) and that runners-up/honorable mentions are in parenthesis.

Band of the Year

1987 - 2006: Eminem (Nelly, Nirvana)
2007 - 2009: U2 (Counting Crows, Passion Pit)
2010: The Killers
2011: Muse (Arcade Fire)
2012: 'Podcasts' (sorry)... (Oasis, Foster The People)
2013: Yeah Yeah Yeahs (T.I., P!nk)
2014: The Head and The Heart (Sara Bareilles, Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
2015: Lake Street Dive (Of Monsters and Men, U2)
2016: Slow Club (Courtney Barnett, Lake Street Dive)
2017: Rubblebucket (Celtic Social Club, U2)
2018: Chvrches (U2, Lake Street Dive)

Rookie of the Year

2017: Chvrches (vkgoeswild Youtube channel)
2018: Arctic Monkeys

Most Improved

2017: Of Monsters and Men (The Head and the Heart)
2018: Muse (Arcade Fire, The Killers)

Lifetime Achievement

2017: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2018: T.I.

i read thinking in bets so you don't have to

Annie Duke’s Thinking In Bets is a thorough examination of decision-making. Her book studies the way people make decisions and offers suggestions for how we can improve our decision-making in the future. A bet, which she defines as a decision about an uncertain future, is a manner of making decisions that she is familiar with from her career as a poker player and much of her book focuses on the mental techniques she used in her playing days to determine whether or not to wager on a given hand.

This book is basically about how to apply a gambler’s thought process to all manners of decision making. The underlying assumption of Thinking In Bets is that bettors tend to make better predictions about the future than those who only make predictions without betting. It isn’t perfectly clear to me why this is the case but it certainly feels true to me after decades of reading and observation. The simplest explanation is probably the best one – when people wager, they have more at risk than those who do not. Therefore, they work harder to make a correct prediction because their bet acts as a way to protect and profit from a prediction.

One common mistake Duke warns against is equating the quality of a decision with the quality of the outcome. I suspect most people know this intuitively but often forget it as soon as a decision leads to a particularly poor (or good) outcome. Over a couple of upcoming posts, we’ll take a closer look at the way Duke recommends analyzing outcomes before considering how this analysis can improve our decision making skills.

the 2018 toa book award – shortlist

Good morning,

We are approaching that wonderful time of the year once more – the award of the most irrelevant prize in literature, the 2018 TOA Book of the Year. The field was a little smaller than in years past – by my final count, I read 65 books this year, down from an average of just over 105 books read per year during 2015-2017 – but there were more than plenty of excellent works to choose from for this year’s shortlist.

So, without additional admin, here is the shortlist for the best book I read in 2018:

The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson (January)
High Output Management by Andy Grove (February)
The Raqqa Diaries by Samer (February)
Bring The Noise by Raphael Honigstein (March)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (May)
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton (May)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (May)
Plain Talk by Ken Iverson (June)
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (July)
Deep Thinking by Gary Kasparov (July)
Tribe by Sebastian Junger (August)
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (September)
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October)
Sceptical Essays by Bertrand Russell (October)
Gridiron Genuis by Michael Lombardi (November)
Little Panic by Amanda Stern (November)
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Murakami, Haruki (December)
Daily Rituals by Mason Currey (December)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (December)

We’ll resume the book award in a few weeks and start eliminating shortlist candidates one or two books at a time. When the list is narrowed down to around four or five, I’ll write a little more extensively about each candidate. Unlike in years past, I intend to get through the award much faster this year, but I suppose I shouldn’t make any promises.

Before we get to the books, however, I want to cover a couple of minor categories for the 2018 TOA Awards. So, next week I’ll start a review of my year in music. After I wrap up the music award, I may take an extra week or two afterward to mention highlights from other minor categories. We’ll circle back to the books soon enough, though, and start whittling down the shortlist each week until we have a winner.