Quote of the Day

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

- Erasmus

Quote of the Day

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

- C.S. Lewis

A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business

And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple.

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How many insights do you need? Well, I’d argue: that you don’t need many in a lifetime. If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it. And that’s with a very brilliant man—Warren’s a lot more able than I am and very disciplined— devoting his lifetime to it. I don’t mean to say that he’s only had ten insights.I’m just saying, that most of the money came from ten insights.

So you can get very remarkable investment results if you think more like a winning pari-mutuel player. Just think of it as a heavy odds against game full of craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other. And you’re probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It’s just that simple.

[--]

And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times. You’re much more likely to do well if you start out to do something feasible instead of something that isn’t feasible. Isn’t that perfectly obvious?

How many of you have 56 brilliant ideas in which you have equal confidence? Raise your hands, please. How many of you have two or three insights that you have some confidence in? I rest my case.

- Read the timeless wisdom from Munger here

Quote of the Day

Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.

- David Hume, Letters of David Hume 2 vols

Interview With Andrew Ng

Today machines can recognize, say, a dog jumping. But what if someone is holding a piece of meat above the dog. We recognize that that’s a slightly different concept, a dog trick. And the piece of meat isn’t just a piece of meat, it’s a treat—a different linguistic idea. Can we get computers to understand these concepts?

Deep learning algorithms are very good at one thing today: learning input and mapping it to an output. X to Y. Learning concepts is going to be hard.

One thing Baidu did several months ago was input an image — and the output was a caption. We showed that you can learn these input-output mappings. There’s a lot of room for improvement but it’s a promising approach for getting computers to understand these high level concepts.

[---]

Do you see AI as a potential threat?

I’m optimistic about the potential of AI to make lives better for hundreds of millions of people. I wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t fundamentally believe that to be true. Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand “please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.” Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving.

I think the fears about “evil killer robots” are overblown. There’s a big difference between intelligence and sentience. Our software is becoming more intelligent, but that does not imply it is about to become sentient.
The biggest problem that technology has posed for centuries is the challenge to labor. For example, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, whose jobs may be affected if we ever manage to develop self-driving cars. I think we need government and business leaders to have a serious conversation about that, and think the hype about “evil killer robots” is an unnecessary distraction.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

- George Orwell

Talking Animals...

In his Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576), Michel de Montaigne ascribed animals’ silence to man’s own wilful arrogance. The  French essayist argued that animals could speak, that they were in possession of rich consciousness, but that man wouldn’t condescend to listen. ‘It is through the vanity of the same imagination that [man] equates himself with God,’ Montaigne wrote, ‘that he attributes divine attributes for himself, picks himself out and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures.’ Montaigne asked: ‘When I play with my cat, who knows if she is making more of a pastime of me than I of her?’

Montaigne’s question is as playful as his cat. Apology is not meant to answer the age-old question, but rather to provoke; to tap into an unending inquiry about the reasoning of animals. Perhaps, Montaigne implies, we simply misunderstand the foreign language of animals, and the ignorance is not theirs, but ours.

Montaigne’s position was a radical one – the idea the animals could actually speak to humans was decidedly anti-anthropocentric – and when he looked around for like-minded thinkers, he found himself one solitary essayist. But if Montaigne was a 16th century loner, then he could appeal to the Classics. Apology is littered with references to Pliny and a particular appeal to Plato’s account of the Golden Age under Saturn. But even there, Montaigne had little to work with. Aristotle had argued that animals lacked logos (meaning, literally, ‘word’ but also ‘reason’) and, therefore, had no sense of the philosophical world inhabited and animated by humans. And a few decades after Montaigne, the French philosopher René Descartes delivered the final blow, arguing that the uniqueness of man stems from his ownership of reason, which animals are incapable of possessing, and which grants him dominion over them.

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In his curious book The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906), E P Evans traces multiple accounts of animal executions from Roman times well into the Renaissance: sows, horses, insects and donkeys all met their death at the hands of well-compensated executioners throughout Europe. Animals were condemned for falling foul of human law: murder, theft, even witchcraft.

But why torture and publicly execute a beast supposedly incapable of logos? The personification of condemned animals is striking precisely because it disturbs; the whole spectacle seems designed to yank them from the world of dumb, unthinking beasts; to demonstrate their capacity for human consciousness, one that entails an awareness of human morality, justice and language. After all, what’s the purpose of retributive justice if the offending party is unable to feel the weight of the anathema?

Perhaps the answer is found in the bloody history of 18th century Paris. During the Great Cat Massacre, apprentice printers captured and hung hundreds of cats. They did so as a gruesome form of protest – to hold someone accountable for their unfair treatment, their physical and financial suffering at the hands of their human masters. With little or no agency, apprentices put the ugly words of their masters into the mouths of innocent cats. The cat killers gave the felines the words they needed to hear and, though their intentionality was quite different, their need for animal logos belonged to the same fantastical world as the internet’s doge.

- More Here

I feel lonely in this century when conversing "debating" about the consciousness of animals, I can only image what Montaigne went through 5 centuries earlier. Sir, I salute you and you have been my inspiration and will be still my last breathe.

Quote of the Day

If you think you’ll find intellectual stimulation, you’re thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I’ve never been more bored by casual chat.

- Andrew Sullivan

An Ode to a Remarkable Human Being - Andrew Sullivan

I have learnt so much from Andrew in the past few years that my life will never be the same. I can only imagine the fire he instills in younger kids (the ones who read him of course); we will miss your blog Andrew, but I am looking forward for a new book from you soon... it would be a dream come true if you could ever team up with Peter Singer....

Here's Tyler on Andrew:

Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years?

This designation should go to someone who actually has helped change the world, rather than just changing lots of minds. It also should go to someone who has embodied key trends of the time, noting that for both standards I am focusing on the United States.

Based on those standards, I am inclined to pick Andrew Sullivan, who is most recently in the news for his announcement that he is quitting after fifteen years of blogging.

Any discussion of Sullivan's influence must begin with gay marriage. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia already have legalized gay marriage, representing a majority of the American population, with possibly Alabama and others to follow. A broader Supreme Court decision for nationwide legalization may be on the way. More generally, gay rights have taken a major leap forward.

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Sullivan was a very early blogger, and in that arena he was tireless too, so dedicated that he now claims blogging is endangering his health. For many years, it was common for his site to put up fifteen or more posts a day, a remarkably large percentage of them interesting or in some way provocative or informative. He embodied the classic blogosphere like no other writer, as he fine-tuned and mastered the art of the blog as an ongoing critical — and indeed substantive — dialog with oneself. He was an inspiration for many writers, myself included, and he gave many of us our first big links and our first taste of how to deal with a crashed site from heavy traffic.

That's two big wins right there, and how many other public intellectuals can come up with one?
I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn't much changed the world; we haven't, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus. Peter Singer led large numbers of people into vegetarianism and veganism and gave those practices philosophic respectability; he is second on my list. A generation ago, I would have picked Milton Friedman, for intellectual leadership in the direction of capitalist and pro-market reforms. But that is now long ago, and the Right has produced no natural successor.

Quote of the Day

Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling.

- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow