Category — Philosophy

Holocaust surviver and psychologists Viktor Frankl delivers an amazing speech on searching for meaning and thinking the best of people. And as Goethe agrees with him, it must be true.

If you haven’t read his memorial from Auschwitz, Man’s Search for Meaning, you should

Last week we endorsed an article on collapsing business models, but having read this must-read critique of it and the journalistic style it applies, one comes to wonder how accurate the analysis really is. When reading articles that tries to make sweeping generalizations just on the basis of a few cases or examples, we must really strive not to be swayed by what is most likely pure dramaturgy and seduction from the author.

A complex system that is very difficult to describe by a single phrase – Photo Credits

Thinking further about  this problem, business books that try to coin new phrases come to mind. Malcom Gladwell is a master of this art writing books such as “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers”.  Be careful when reading this, [Read more →]

Question 2010 by Katinka Matson

That is the annual question of the Edge Network. They have several interesting essays on the topic here.  In particular, I like Frank Schirrmacher’s asking if  we are we turning into a new species — informavores. Recommended.

The Future State of Humanity? Photo by Aaron Haussman

Friedrich Georg Jünger, translator of the Iliad to the German and expert on Pre-Socratic philosophy has written one of the most powerful critiques of technology named “Failure of Technology: Perfection without Purpose.” I will present some of his most important criticisms of technological progress in general and their relevance for the technological development we are seeing today.

For better or worse, it is certain that technological development is truly changing our society and the way we live. [Read more →]

Picture by Eric Pouchier

As we are being told that global warming looms, fossil fuels are running out, people are starving all over the world, and a global recession may not be over for a while;  encouragements to only take for oneself what is really necessary are becoming increasingly common. On the surface, this sounds nice. If we only consume what is necessary, then there will be more of everything left for those in greater need, we won’t pollute as much, and so on.

Nevertheless, whenever I hear someone urging others to restrict themselves to what is necessary, I can’t help but think: “necessary for what?” Necessity, by definition, means something you can’t do without. However, in order for such a word to make any sense at all, one needs to define what something is necessary for. For example, gasoline is necessary for most cars to drive. It is not, however, necessary for bicycling. And so on.

Now, when we are urged to only take what is necessary, then what are we really imagining as whatever we take being necessary for? The “good life”? In that case, how is “what is necessary” different from “what we want”? Perhaps it is necessary for a lot of us to have a summer house in Tuscany and drink expensive red wine for dinner every day. Or are we talking about what is merely necessary for survival? In that case, pretty much all conveniences that have been discovered during the last  hundred thousand years are not necessary. Forget about needing a cellphone, you don’t even get a house – your ancestors did just fine in a nice, warm cave. Is it necessary to live beyond age 80? Is it even necessary to be alive at all?

By all means, conserve all you want. But all this talk about restricting ourselves only to what we need is – at the very best – both quite absurd and a little intellectually annoying.

I recently read Siddharta by Hermann Hesse,  a wonderful book set in ancient India about a young man’s search for understanding and inner peace. Amongst other profoundities, the book also contains some interesting insights on trading and investment. After a thorough brahmin education, followed by three years of life as an ascetic sadhu, the young Siddharta becomes an apprentice under a rich merchant. Only knowing how to, according to himself, think, wait, and fast, he quickly becomes a highly successful and very rich merchant. Importantly, he does this not by using greed or a hunger for “success” as a motivation, but rather by means of cool detachment. Hesse, of course, describes this far more eloquently than I could ever hope to:

“This Brahmin,” [the master merchant Kamaswami] said to a friend, “is not a proper merchant and will never be one; never is his heart passionately engaged in our transactions. But he has the secret of those to whom success comes of ts own accors, be it that he was born under a lucky star, be it magic, be it something he learned among the Samanas. He seems only to be playing at doing business. Never do the transactions have any real effect on him; never are they his master; never does he fear failure or worry over a loss.”

There is an interesting connection here, of course, to modern “practical investment” literature, in which the virtues of emotional control and self discipline are frequently emphasized as being of critical importance to success. The lesson to be drawn from Hesse, then, is perhaps that one possibly extremely effective way of achieving this just this is to not care very much about money – in a Siddhartian sense, “rise above” is perhaps a more appropriate choice of words.

It might not be so easy, though. In Hesse’s work,  Siddhartas spirituality is almost completely killed off by many years of hedonism and financial success – and he becomes so emotionally and philosophically tortured that he abandons his life as a wealthy merchant and almost commits suicide.

I like Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. His criticism of risk management and the notion that we fail to notice that for every success story we see, there are many failures – don’t be fooled by randomness (so-called selection bias). At the same time he is extremely harsh towards those he criticizes and always a fun, but not too serious read.

He has a new essay up on his website where he anecdotically promotes a new form of living and exercise. Instead of working out an hour everyday and getting our healthy steady 8 hours of sleep, he suggest we should live like hunter gatherers. Fast randomly a couple of days, vary our sleeping schedule and walk low intensity a couple of hours a day, but mix that with some very intense ones, introducing stochasticity, Black Swans, and leptokurtosis into our efficent, normally distributed lives.

A few quotes:

“The only thing currently missing from my life is the absence of panics, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night.”

“walks in a stimulating urban setting, but with occasional (and random) very short sprints, making myself angry imagining I were chasing the bankster Robert Rubin with a big stick trying to catch him to bring him to human justice.”

Read it here

Picture from http://www.jimrlong.us/

On our recent and very pleasurable trip the the United States, some of my more conservative friends who we were visiting insisted on showing us one of their new favorite movies - An American Carol. The movie is a railing if highly inconsistent criticism of any and every idea championed by liberal America anno 2008, in particular its anti-war sentiment. The main character of the movie is Michael Moore (“Malone” in the movie), who takes the role as the scrooge of 4th of july – and is visited by three ghosts, amongst them General George Patton and country singer Trace Atkins (proudly playing himself). On his way to salvation and pro-war attitudes, he is slapped in the face repeatedly by an (as always) morally righteous Bill O’Reilly (also played by himself), who warns Moore that he is abusing his freedom of speech by preaching pacifism. In particular, the film echoes conservative America by claiming that Michael Moore and his followers – by questioning the moral superiority of the United States at war [Read more →]

Picture by Josh Abene

In economics, the assumption that economic actors – i.e. people – are “rational” is a common one. By “rational” we mean that people, given a ranking of their preferences, will choose whatever options they prefer the most. Ironically, our definition of “rationality” means doing whatever you feel like.

More importantly, it means that if we propose to know how “rational” economic actors will behave, we are in fact proposing that we are intimately familiar with the emotional life of every economic actor relevant to our model.

It is of course easy to assume a preference ranking when working in the abstract. Also, we can argue that by putting a price or “pseudo-price” on anything and everything, we can just assume that everyone just wants a ton of money because this can be traded in for whatever else you might want. If you ask me, such a argument only proves right those who claim economists are amongst those who “know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”

While writing the last post I came over this by Paul Krugman:

“I should also mention that you don’t need to go back to Tobin 1975 to see serious academic analysis of the issue. Gautti Eggertson at the NY Fed has been doing yeoman work on all of this, for example here.”

Implying, to me at least, that there should be some intrinsic value to the freshness of the analysis. I concur that something new might well be more relevant, but then its the relevancy that makes it better and not the novelty. It is not at all given that the newest is the most relevant; it depends. 

I would much rather follow the somewhat impossible advise of Vicor Niederhoffer in his “The Education of a Speculator”, that you should only read books that are at least a hundred years old; it is first when they are still deemed valuable after so long that they have proven their real worth and quality.