Fooled By Randomness

The book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a philosopher of randomness.

After reading the book, I know:

1. If you are not getting your kicks being a trader, become a dentist.

2. If you see pigs waltzing in the sky among the cloud patterns, look again, they are just clouds.

3. If a bunch of black swans happen to fly by your house, you can count yourself blessed, for such an event to happen would be overturning probability, physics, genetic research and assyrian music on its head.

4. If even one black swan were to fly by your house, you can count yourself extremely lucky, for such an event also would begin leading to above mentioned effects.

5. If said black swan were to fly by your house, you should start preparing for the worst, for it is a symbol of highly unlikely (and bad) events.

6. Random is as random can be. Or maybe not. People tend to explain random as non-random. Or the other way around. I dont know anymore.

7. We look for answers where there are none, and indeed need not even be. But we look anyway.

8. We see only the one lucky chap who wrote his masterpiece and booked himself the booker, pulitzer and other such along the way. We miss out on the other two trillion ninety zillion and fifty five who didnt. This is surviving a bias. Or some such.

9. When you bet and win, you win small - you can do this for a long long time. But when you lose - you lose BIG.

10. The Infinite Monkey Theorem has references in more places than I thought possible.

And finally, if I were a trader on the market hedging my bets, or looking out for the black swan, or wondering why the dog did not bark, or trying to count how many times in an hour the phone did not ring, and seriously considering the possibility of ending up like Buridan's Donkey, what are the chances that I would say dump it all and become a dentist?

That, my friend, is as random as random can get.

The Cult of the Amateur

The Web is full of "user generated nonsense" - is in a nutshell one of the conclusions of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.

Also more conclusions are that the second coming of the Web will destroy our moral fibre, it will be the downfall of organized Man as we know it, and completely drive every record store in the world out of business.

The author, while taking up this argument on behalf of the well-read, qualified, learned and wise expert is going up against a wall of monumental proportions. For, as is known but is difficult to quantify in terms of actual numbers, for every qualified "creator" of content in this world there are many more, much and many many times more, "consumer as creator" types (such like me and the upwards of 95% of the bloggers out there in the blogosphere) churning out content - be it the written word, the moving image, voice, stills etc. etc. They are creating, editing, moderating, ranking, promoting, eliminating, blacklisting with an energy not seen before. The Wikipedias, the YouTubes, the MySpaces and others like them stand grand testimony to the fact.

I however, enjoyed this read, as I went through chapter after chapter of the rant enjoying with some glee the passion with which the fair name of the Internet Culture was being sullied. It is, in a way thought provoking, for indeed there must be some acknowledgement of the years of effort that has gone into the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and the subsequent application of that to a creation, any creation, that the learned and the qualified of this world come up with. If you come to think of it, that can continue - where is the need for all this opposition. Its not as if a learned opinion is being denied a place on the Web. It is merely being asked to co-exist with all the other "drivel" out there. Well, the rules for getting your opinion a place in the sun in terms of showing up high in the search engines and getting visibility are the same as for anybody else - so that way its a fair fight. So, I say, why complain - its just that the playing field has just gotten a lot bigger - a lot LOT BIGGER - and is visible to a lot more people than ever before.

There is however merit in what the author says about all this leading to a tremendous waste of time - a very precious commodity in today's world - I fully agree with this. What is needed is a means to be able to retrieve relevant and useful information. If by some means, this can be achieved, where the search engine can return useful, qualified content as opposed to other user-generated rubbish, it could very well turn out to be the next killer app. But who/what decides what is useful and relevant and what is not? I guess thats the first part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before moving onto the next.

Napoleon's Glance

If you were to find yourself in the times of old, and you happened to be riding on a horse, and then without warning, a bolt out of the blue were to strike you with such force that it would knock you off your horse - well, you might just have experienced a coup d'oeil.

Napoleon's Glance, by William R. Duggan, is a book which talks of characters that got knocked off horses in such a manner. Well, not quite, but the sudden inspiration, the striking of the idea, the flash of brilliance resulting in knowing what to do exactly at the right time is what the book is all about.

Strategy - what exactly works and what doesnt.

It starts off with Napoleon, conqueror of most of Europe, who is credited with having had a coup d'oeil, literally strike of the eye, hence Napoleon's Glance. This sudden insight into things based on the deep study of past experiences of others and the ability to apply this insight in the present circumstances, forms the basis of the book. The author applies this to a bunch of characters that include St. Paul, General George S. Patton, Pablo Piccasso, Joan of Arc and the founder of the Kingdom of Mali. He draws a distinction between the two approaches to strategy, one in which the entire campaign is planned out in advance and then played out according to the plan, and the other in which a deep study of past campaigns is what allows sudden flashes of brilliance lead the way. So in one you try to make the circumstances fit the plan, and in the other the circumstances allow you to come up with the plan.

Interesting read.

Last Chance To See

Have you seen the aye-aye? the komodo dragon? The mountain gorilla? the kakapo? the baiji dolphin?the rodrigues fruitbat? If you have, then you are one of the lucky ones. These are on the endangered species list, scheduled to disappear into the night sometime in the near future if we dont get our act together and make the right moves to help conserve and further their tribe.

I havent seen any of them. But after reading Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine, I have. The book is a fascinating account of these animals and birds told in the inimitable style of Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ). In a departure from writing humorous science-fiction (if I can call it that - it bugs me when I can never find Douglas Adams listed under Humor but under Science-Fiction), here is a book written after he took an expedition around the world with Mark Carwardine, a zoologist, writer and photographer.

To quote from the opening page of the book:

"This isn't at all what I expected. In 1985, by some sort of journalistic accident I was sent to Madagascar with Mark Carwardine to look for an almost extinct form of lemur called the aye-aye. None of the three of us had met before. I had never met Mark, Mark had never met me, and no one, apparently, had seen an aye-aye in years.

This was the idea of the Observer Colour Magazine, to throw us all in at the deep end. Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist, working at that time for the World Wildlife Fund, and his role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise. All the aye-aye had to do was do what aye-ayes have been doing for millions of years - sit in a tree and hide."

Believe me, after that the book is un-putdownable! I have always enjoyed his work, and this book is an excellent read - for the wonderfully humorous detailing of all these endangered animals and birds. Get hold of a copy and read it.

Wikinomics

Mass collaboration changes everything! Or does it?

For a treatment on this subject you could read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

Openness, Peering, Sharing and Going Global: these concepts are dealt with in the book covering a wide range of examples from a mining company that opened up its internal data to the world to get people around the world to come up with locations where they could mine to the well known ongoing Linux collaborative effort. Do organizations still need to follow the strict closed door approach to innovation and research or would it make sense to throw open the doors and allow the collective mind to go to work for them. Is the wiki workplace really what we are heading towards? Peering, a marketplace for ideas, the Prosumer, collaborative research, common platforms for innovation, and above all, the collaborative mind making for a new world. Is this really the direction that we need to go in?

An interesting read.

Blog Schmog

Does blogging have a future? So asks Robert W. Bly in his book Blog Schmog attempting to lay out clearly what in his opinion, the truth about what blogs can and cant do for your business.

There are all those parts that talk about blogs being a means to voicing an opinion, having your say, and building yourself into a community - I agree with all that. The parts where it helps/does not help your business - I couldn't really say, I do not have a business, nor have I used blogs in any way to market any of my ideas. Its an interesting book. The author's article about bloggin had generated a fair amount of response.