Few things are more rewarding than receiving an email from your supervisor, expressing concern that he has not heard from you for a while, and then replying back, promptly(!), with a 200-page, 80,000-word monster of a first draft…
That will shut him up for a while, which is not to say that we do not get along fine.
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it’s only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But (…)bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug.
The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely”.
There is no way to gauge the effectiveness of their lending activity by observing it over a day, a week, a month, or . . . even a century!
(…) the real- estate collapse of the early 1990s in which the now defunct savings and loan industry required a taxpayer-funded bailout of more than half a trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve bank protected them at our expense: when “conservative” bankers make profits, they get the benefits; when they are hurt, we pay the costs.
Once again, recall the story of banks hiding explosive risks in their portfolios. It is not a good idea to trust corporations with matters such as rare events because the performance of these executives is not observable on a short-term basis, and they will game the system by showing good performance so they can get their yearly bonus. The Achilles’ heel of capitalism is that if you make corporations compete, it is sometimes the one that is most exposed to the negative Black Swan that will appear to be the most fit for survival.
As if we did not have enough problems, banks are now more vulnerable to the Black Swan and the ludic fallacy than ever before with “scientists” among their staff taking care of exposures. The giant firm J. P. Morgan put the entire world at risk by introducing in the nineties RiskMetrics, a phony method aiming at managing people’s risks, causing the generalized use of the ludic fallacy, and bringing Dr. Johns into power in place of the skeptical Fat Tonys. (A related method called “Value-at-Risk,” which relies on the quantitative measurement of risk, has been spreading.)
Scissored from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (April 2007).
While I do not give a rat’s rear about the usefulness of so-called academic league tables, it is striking just how much in favour they are of English-speaking institutions. The Times Higher Education - 2008 QS World University Rankings place only one non-anglophone university in the top 20: University of Tokyo (19); and a total of five six within the top 30: ETH Zurich (24), Kyoto University (25), U of Hong Kong (26), École Normale Supérieure Paris (29), and National University of Singapore (30).
What happened to Continental European institutions? Germany’s highest placed entry, Heidelberg, for example, comes in at 57.
Thank god it is over! Berlin was yet again a wonderful backdrop for the 35th marathon; with brilliant weather, excellent organisation, one million spectators, 60 bands and a new world record, what is not to like about an event like this?
My own race plan, or lack thereof, brilliantly thought out en route, consisted of tagging on to a fast, unsuspecting Swede, who ploughed his way through the runners ahead at breakneck pace, along with my brother. He did probably wonder why his shadows were a) multiple; b) blue, red, white, and black; and c) sweaty and huffing and puffing, but nevertheless he did not charge us for his services. At the outset, we thought we would stay somewhere in between the 3:15-3:30-hour ‘balloons’ (there are pacers running at a fixed speed, and they come with a big, orange balloon attached to them), but the Swede overtook the faster of them after a couple of minutes only.
Thinking and running like a terrier rather than a (clever) owl, I should probably have let go of the postman’s Swede’s leg a bit earlier, but at the 30-kilometre-mark I started to feel a bit like a snowman in late July. So, for lack of legs to keep up with Eeeemil, my next ‘strategy’ centred on identifying the ‘weakest’ looking runners, getting behind them, and repeating, ad nauseum, the mantra: “If s/he can do it, so can you” (R.I.P. Scatman John). And, of course, even the 70-year-old-prosthesis-wearing-fibre-androids would outpace me in a matter of minutes.
My deep-felt gratitude goes out to the guy who at 38 kilometres shouted at me: “Christian, du musst laufen!” I do not know what he was sinking about, but the remark was spot on.
In conclusion, I would not recommend anyone to follow this ‘plan.’ In fact, in most cases, I think it is a jolly good idea to invest a few seconds of thought before doing silly stuff or, um, speaking in public.
Lastly, I think Murakami’s and Stuff White People Like’s thoughts are utterly brilliant and strangely complementary takes on the same topic; Murakami describes in clear, unassuming prose why running is as much an intellectual endeavour as a physical one, whereas Stuff White People Like had me chuckling about the ridiculousness of the whole thing (the comments make it even more hilarious).