Curt Doolittle

Form: Quote Commentary

  • SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM? —“The easiest way to look like (and be) the smartest

    SMARTEST GUY IN THE ROOM?

    —“The easiest way to look like (and be) the smartest guy in the room is ask the questions a reporter is supposed to ask (but seldom does these days.) Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? Easy peasy, I’ve been doin’ it for decades.”— Glenn R. Tankersley

    Smart.

    Me, I follow incentives, and ask why anyone would do such a thing. People don’t do what they should. They do what they have the incentives to do. Getting stuff done is largely crafting the incentives needed by people who need to do things.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-04 14:50:00 UTC

  • IS SARCASTIC HUMOR, BUT HERE IS AN HONEST RESPONSE The solution to valueless mee

    https://medium.com/comedy-corner/10-tricks-to-appear-smart-during-meetings-27b489a39d1aOP IS SARCASTIC HUMOR, BUT HERE IS AN HONEST RESPONSE

    The solution to valueless meetings is actually to teach classes in creativity on one hand and communication on the other, so that you know which you’re going to engage in. Most people schedule meetings not to inform but to either persuade, or to problem solve. And while informing, and persuading are good for formal meeting structures, problem solving is not something that is suitable for the traditional meeting format. Unfortunately (a) people think creativity is an intuition or talent rather than a process (b) won’t work hard enough to prepare a problem solving meeting, and (c) limited numbers of people will invest in a problem solving meeting as companies are currently organized.

    Great companies swap this around, and force non-creative meetings into email, and train employees to conduct creative sessions, and use peer reviews to rate people’s performance in those creative sessions, and therefore compensate people for participation in creative sessions.

    Given that I’ve been doing this for most of my career I’ll throw out that the solution to most problems exists in most companies and middle and upper management blocks those solutions from coming out or being implemented because of the organizational impact solutions would have.

    SO instead of organizing so that they can implement solutions they organize to resist them in a fallacious attempt at obtaining efficiency. Which is really a code word for ‘not requiring management to manage’. which in turn produces rent seeking behaviors throughout an organization.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-04 14:47:00 UTC

  • “From the behavior of many rich people we can infer they live constantly terrori

    —“From the behavior of many rich people we can infer they live

    constantly terrorized that other rich people think that they are

    poorer than they actually are.”— Taleb

    Well, as a former member of that set, the thrill of the competition in one’s field, despite that much of it is a lottery effect, is exceeded only by the excitement of meeting and working with increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane people, on projects and ideas that are increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane.

    Nassim dealt with the (exasperating and epistemically challenged) financial sector, but engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes and artists tend to be fairly interesting – and they fill you with awe and humility. And that experience is as awe inspiring on a daily basis as is the feeling of revelation one experienced from one’s most profound professors.

    So we tend to forget that what separates the west from the rest is heroism. Egalitarian heroism. And the absurd excesses of the upper economic classes are a minor side effect of the cultural processes that create them. And that cultural process is what produces, when not suppresses by authority or mysticism, the rapid evolution of western civilization, despite its status as a small, poor, backward people on the margins of the bronze age.

    Be glad we produce such extremes, because of the benefits we obtain from the cultural process that creates them.

    Revel in it. If there is anything in man that approaches the divine, that is it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-03 09:42:00 UTC

  • “My view is that concepts are open-ended classifications based on leaving detail

    “My view is that concepts are open-ended classifications based on leaving details unspecified. They are densely stitched together through relationships of similarity and context. This ties back to Newton’s errors and the fact that there is no “bang on” infinite. Newton’s scientific writings are infected with a sense of the mystical, which should not surprise anyone who has studied Newton in depth. He made deductions from phenomena that are pure nonsense and are more within the realm of pseudo-science.” — Michael Phillip

    Well said. Very. Thank you.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-03 02:23:00 UTC

  • “Had Newton realized that infinity is merely a mathematical concept and cannot e

    —“Had Newton realized that infinity is merely a mathematical concept and cannot exist in nature, he would not have held onto absolute time.”— Michael Philip

    I think we should refer to infinity as a metaphor because a ‘concept’ is an experiential term not operational. But other than that, Michael’s observation is indicative of the catastrophic propagation of destructive (immoral) ideas into the commons by the consequences of non-operational definitions.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-02 01:31:00 UTC

  • READING There may not be a revolution but there certainly can be a civil war

    http://www.garynorth.com/public/12619.cfmWORTH READING

    There may not be a revolution but there certainly can be a civil war…

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-01 11:45:00 UTC

  • AN EXAMPLE Of PRIVATIZATION OF THE MILITARY

    https://twitter.com/steve_sailer/status/483497920092581888BLACKWATER: AN EXAMPLE Of PRIVATIZATION OF THE MILITARY

    http://www.unz.com/isteve/great-moments-in-privatization-blackwater/

    https://twitter.com/steve_sailer/status/483497920092581888

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-30 05:49:00 UTC

  • I SAID – “DIFFERENT RATES OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/opinion/sunday/why-teenagers-act-crazy.htmlLIKE I SAID – “DIFFERENT RATES OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 12:01:00 UTC

  • WOMEN ARE MORE LIKELY TO USE VIOLENCE IN A RELATIONSHIP. (My personal experience

    http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/relationship-terrorists-study-finds-women-likely-physically-abusive-men/#axzz361QwDcBMYES: WOMEN ARE MORE LIKELY TO USE VIOLENCE IN A RELATIONSHIP.

    (My personal experience is certainly the same)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 06:20:00 UTC

  • MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another to

    MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE

    Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another topic I wanted to ask about. You’ve had some harsh words for Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose new book is trendy in liberal circles right now. Do you think he’s right that we’re going to see a growing gap between the rich and the poor in the coming years?

    Marc Andreessen:The funny thing about Piketty is that he has a lot more faith in returns on invested capital than any professional investor I’ve ever met. It’s actually very interesting about his book. This is exactly what you’d expect form a French socialist economist. He assumes it’s really easy to put money in the market for 40 years or 80 years or 100 years and have it compound at these amazing rates. He never explains how that’s supposed to happen.

    Every investment manager I know is sweating the opposite problem, which is: what do I do? Where do I get the growth? I can’t get into the public market, so I have to go into the private market. The problem in the private market is there isn’t much growth. Maybe a dozen hedge funds. After that they’re not that good. The returns degrade down to S&P 500 levels.

    Timothy B. Lee: That’s not so bad is it? The S&P 500 has returned 6 or 7 percent real growth for the last few decades.

    Marc Andreessen:Yeah, 6 or 7 percent. But if you look at the last 15 years they’re much less than that. Jeremy Siegel put out his book about how there’s never been a 10-year period where you lose money in the stock market — right at the beginning of a very long period where you lose money for 10-plus years.

    Piketty thinks it’s really easy to compound capital at scale. There’s just a lot of evidence that that’s not true. The shining example of that is: where are all the big companies and the big families?

    If you look at what’s actually happening in the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500, churn is accelerating. One year it’s some real estate family, and then the next year it’s like, “There’s Larry Page, where did he come from?” Somehow Piketty looks through that to a world where all this change is going to just stop. [He has] this idea that normal is 18th-century feudal France, and we’re going to go back to it.

    He does this other dodge where the 20th century doesn’t conform to his theory, but that’s because of the wars and economic dislocations. And so it’s like the 21st century is predicted to be much more peaceful and calm. I don’t know about you but that’s not what I see happening. I look around the world right now and I see exciting things happening that’s causing a lot of changes.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 01:29:00 UTC