Escape From Pianosa

The Tao. This book kept coming up in my thoughts so I decided to read it. What does it mean? I cannot say for sure, but I’m fascinated with the idea of “wu-wei,” which some translate as unattached action, effortless effort, or action through inaction.

Unattached action is my favorite translation, and I interpret it to mean that you should act purposefully, but without great attachment to the outcomes of your actions, for you can never truly control the consequences of your actions nor can you control (or predict) the future environment in which those consequences will play out. In other words, don’t worry too much about the future because you can’t predict it.

This thought has come up recently for me in improv, when teachers talk about not going into a scene with pre-conceived notions about what that scene will entail. If you try and force your pre-conceived notion of what the scene will be about, then you will be rigid and unable to react and respond appropriately to your partner. Basically, you will suck because you are trying to shape your future in a way that is impossible (unless your partner is a mind-reader).

It came up again when I read Nassim Taleb. The Black Swan has no doubt changed my philosophy of life. He showed me just how damn hard it is to predict the future. Better to live in the moment and not create anxiety for yourself when the things that shape your life will probably be unforeseen and heavily influenced by luck.

Is this all a recipe for complete inaction and resignation? Absolutely not. Your actions today will still shape the future, and not in entirely random ways. Move toward what you want in life, but don’t plan too far ahead, and be flexible for when conditions change. At least that’s my current experiment in life philosophy.

Impro, by Keith Johnstone, is a brilliant book. It’s written for comedic improvisers and teachers of improv but it’s so much more than that. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in creativity or human behavior. It begins with an autobiographical description by Johnstone, of his life at school and how his creativity was stunted and hammered out of him by vicious and probably well-meaning teachers.

So you must work to reclaim your imagination. It’s not so much that you are un-imaginative, rather that you are ashamed of what your imagination spits out, and you have been taught to be this way (and sometimes what your subconscious spits out can be rather gruesome or even fearful). Don’t fear your imagination, it’s a great asset. It’s ok if you have nasty thoughts. You can acknowledge them without acting on them.

How is your creativity stamped out? In school your goal is always to be right and correct and to get an A, and this is a great way to stamp out creativity because it fosters the illusion that there is one-right-answer to questions you will face in life, and it exacts a penalty for being wrong. Of course when you are creating, you cannot be wrong. But the system’s not set up to make you creative.

I blame government schools of course, although your friends and family can be just as repressive, starting from a very early age. The schools are inhumane in many ways and one can see that by visiting even the best of the public schools and seeing how many students are falling asleep, bored to tears, and in revolt. I felt intuitively that there was something wrong with the system when I was in high school, although I could never put my finger on it.

Being relatively intelligent, I figured out that to make people happy I could game the system and get the A’s I needed to keep my teachers and parents happy. I felt the same way years later when I worked for Social Security but by then I couldn’t stomach the game anymore.

Nassim Taleb’s book really got me thinking about luck, and how to incorporate the idea of luck into a philosophy of life. If we are bad at predicting, for instance, what career will make us happy, then we should try as many different careers as possible to see which one we like. We should take lots of small risks, with a chance for a big payoff.

If I try out a career as a real estate agent, and I find that I don’t like it, then I have failed. I’ve made an error. But I’ve lost very little–my risk was small. In fact, the discomfort I experienced in a career I disliked was probably balanced out by the comfort of my newfound knowledge.

I can repeat this process with many careers until I find one that I enjoy immensely–my Black Swan career so to speak–something that I enjoy so much, that all the previous failures and erroneous predictions about what career would make me happy are insignificant.

In attempting this process, I must be wary of the confirmation bias. If, before becoming a real estate agent, I convince myself that real estate will make me happy (as opposed to keeping an open mind about the result), then I will look for confirming evidence of this belief. I will say “see, I do love real estate!” every time something positive happens, and I will tend to ignore the disconfirming evidence until it grows so immense that I am unable to ignore it.

Falling into such a trap will cause me to waste precious time that could be spent looking elsewhere for career satisfaction. And more time wasted means fewer opportunities to find the ideal career.

I just finished reading the most amazing book–The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a real masterpiece of an essay. I learned so much from the book that I can barely begin to describe it all.

The most important ideas I learned are that there are major limits to our knowledge, and that uncertainty plays a large role in our lives. Experts and laymen alike are simply not good at predicting the future–especially “Black Swans,” extremely high-impact events that are unforeseeable. There can be good black swans (your novel becomes a bestseller making your rich) and bad ones (the stock market crashes and your retirement fund is wiped out).

Taleb delves deeply into epistemology–which inspired me to read Karl Popper–and so many other areas like probability, prediction, markets, bell curves vs. power laws; the book is so fascinating, you’ll just have to read it yourself.

Having heard Ali G accuse so many of his detractors of “racialism,” I thought it was just a word made up by Sacha Baron Cohen. Alas, it’s really used in Britain, and there’s no parody here:

“So she explained. The Green Man, she said, prided itself on being the most racialist pub in England. That was her word: racialist. There were other racialist pubs, she said. In fact there were two more in Bury. But none was as consistently racialist as the Green Man. The Green Man, she continued, had never served a colored person.”

That’s from Among the Thugs by Bill Buford, a fascinating read about a reporter who infiltrates a gang of English soccer hooligans. It’s a good way to knock that notion of European civility from your brain, if only temporarily.

I was browsing quotations from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in search of a byline for this blog. I came across this little gem from the scene in Rome where Nately, the Amerian optimist and patriot finds himself arguing with the Old Man in Rome. What fascinates me is how the old man’s arguments strike me as being both utterly absurd, yet profoundly true.

America,” [the Old Man] said, “will lose the war. And Italy will win it.”

America is the stongest and most prosperous nation on earth,” Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. “And the American fighting man is second to none.”

“Exactly,” agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that’s exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly.”

“I’m sorry I laughed at you. But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don’t call that doing very well, do you?”

“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we’re still here. In a few years, you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I’m quite certain Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed” …

….”I don’t believe anything you tell me,” Nately replied… “The only thing I do believe is that America is going to win the war.”

“You put so much stock in winning wars. The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of winning. But now that we’re losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.”

It’s easy to play the game and substitute ‘Iraq’ for ‘Italy,’ but I think that’s too simplistic. Iraq is not doing so well, and may be far worse after the U.S. leaves. Still, there are some parallels to be drawn. Americans are dying every day and some day we will look back and wonder how the greatest army in the world lost to a fighting force “second to all.”

Brian Doherty’s book, Radicals for Capitalism, was an utter joy to read–all 619 pages. In fact, I would’ve enjoyed a few hundred more of his “freewheeling history” of the libertarian movement in the U.S. This masterpiece gives a great deal of context and history to everything I’ve been reading about for the past few years.

Doherty’s well-crafted narrative navigates the thoughts, ideas, conflicts, and lives of the five figures central to the libertarian movement in the 20th century: Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Frederich Hayek, while saying a great deal about the myriad other characters (and some were really characters) that have played a role in the advancement of liberty in the United States.

I particularly enjoyed this quote from the epilogue because I think (or hope?) that it sums up the general spirit of liberty that will be so prevalent among members of my generation.:

“Look at it this way: You’re young, you’re intelligent, you have a rough sense that people ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else-a simple, honest, live-and-let-live moral sense…You have a basic appreciation for free markets, an idea associated win American politics with the GOP.
“But you are young, and you don’t want to order people around regarding things you know are their business, and theirs alone. You certainly don’t want to be on any team that’s obsessed with locking people up for what they smoke, or treating people differently under the law because they’re gay…
So what are you? You might start thinking of yourself as libertarian.”

I just finished The Alchemist by Paul Coelho, which I enjoyed. This was my favorite passage:

“Why do you tend a flock of sheep?”

“Because I like to travel.”

The old man pointed to a baker standing in his shop window at one corner of the plaza. “When he was a child, that man wanted to travel, too. But he decided first to buy his bakery and put some money aside. When he’s an old man, he’s going to spend a month in Africa. He never realized that people are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”

“He should have decided to become a shepherd,” the boy said.

“Well, he thought about that, ” the old man said. “But bakers are more important people than shepherds. Bakers have homes, while shepherds sleep out in the open. Parents would rather see their children marry bakers than shepherds.”

I’m reading Freakonomics, a wildly popular book that has also caused some controversy among real estate agents. First off, the book really is a great read and fascinating for anyone, not just amateur econ-nerds like myself.

The gist of the real estate section is that the incentives of real estate agents are not perfectly aligned with the incentives for home sellers. Sellers naturally want top dollar for their property, although they will not wait forever to get it. And of course agents also want high sales prices. So what’s not aligned?

Well, let’s say that your home is listed at $300,000 and after a week on the market, you get an offer for $290,000. That’s $10,000 less than what you wanted, a very big number to you. However, it’s not so much for your agent. If the seller’s agent is getting 3%, and has to pay half of that to his broker and the IRS, then a reduction of $10,000 in the sale price equates to a $150 reduction in the agent’s commission. Not really a big deal for the agent, money-wise.

The homeowner has a very strong incentive for wanting a higher price, while the agent only has a small incentive. The homeowner might be willing to wait three more weeks or three more months to get a higher price, while three months for $150 just isn’t worth it for the agent. The homeowner makes the final decision, but the agent has influence on the homeowner’s decision.

Now I believe that good real estate agents will recognize this situation, ignore it, and act in their client’s best interest. In fact, Dubner’s analysis doesn’t take into account another incentive that agents have–the fact that getting a higher price for their client will make for a happier client and ultimately more referrals.

I suspect that the misaligned incentives have a greater effect on agents who are more shortsighted and aren’t thinking about the longer run incentives of providing the best service possible. Any ideas on how to determine whether or not a prospective agent would be affected by the incentive to sell quickly?