Perfectionism and Fear of Success

[IdleRich]

And I sort of mused on this (I mean my last post, got interrupted). We have all seen those Storage Wars type programmes and we of course know
about those spaces on which those shows are predicated, but they are such weird things. I assume that spaces you can rent to store your stuff in have always been around in some form but things I've read about people buying stuff then having it delivered to their storage unit seems new and strange. Again it's owning something and not really having it... these things with the possessions lost in the collection also remind me of that story with the prince who lost a ring or something so he bought both shores of the sea and claimed to still have it.

 

[IdleRich]

Nassim Taleb has that bit about Umberto Eco's "antilibrary",

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

I remember that from when I read it. I like the idea but the way he categorises people always annoyed me. I mean if someone is impressed by Eco's reading does it really mean that they view libraries as an ego-boosting appendage?

I mean it's perfectly possible for someone to be smart enough to understand the value of unread books and be impressed that he's read a lot but Talleb wants to tell you his wise parable regardless of whether or not it makes sense.

 

[version]

I remember that from when I read it. I like the idea but the way he categorises people always annoyed me. I mean if someone is impressed by Eco's reading does it really mean that they view libraries as an ego-boosting appendage?

I mean it's perfectly possible for someone to be smart enough to understand the value of unread books and be impressed that he's read a lot but Talleb wants to tell you his wise parable regardless of whether or not it makes sense.

He's a knob.

 

[IdleRich]

He's a knob.

Unfortunately I think that you're right. I used to like him, in fact he gave a talk at some event in Oxford and I went to see it - and as I remember it the talk was good and he came across as quite personable, which is really the best that you can hope for. Since then however he seems to have come out with a load of stupid stuff and he seems more and more arrogant in interviews.

Also a few years back he was quite visible for some reason and at that time his fund which used a trading strategy that was almost a translation of his whole philosophical worldview into maths wasn't performing at all well, and, if I remember correctly interviewers were forbidden from discussing or asking about the performance of the fund. To me this attitude of banning discussion of his failures was exactly the kind of thing that he had mocked in the past so it seemed really hypocritical, but more than that, it felt that he was lecturing people on what they should do and how they should do it while his attempt to do just that was totally failing, and people were forbidden from asking about it or challenging the main substance of it. At least, that's how I remember it anyway.

Looking back on it all I reckon that when he was succeeding and he was on top of the world he was happy and thus he came across as nice and he didn't need to be arrogant and aggressive. However, when he wasn't doing so well he got kinda tetchy and moody and - probably feeling insecure - he suddenly felt the need to constantly tell people how brilliant he was.

Also, as far as I can tell he has pretty much put out the same book three or four times with different titles and he even repeats the same fucking examples about black swans and how turkeys aren't prepared for the farmers to kill them cos they reason inductively.

I am probably being unfair though now. I guess it's quite common that if you like you like someone and then you feel that they have let you down you turn on them more viciously than you would have done if you had never been so impressed by them in the first place. I did really like what he had to say about induction and in fact it is important to be aware of the limits of that and it did get me thinking about thinking and influence me in ways that were certainly for the better and long-lasting.

Also, on a more personal note, when I used to work trading options, the main model for pricing options was called the Black-Scholes Model named after two economists or something, and I have only bad memories of that time, so I greatly enjoy the story about how Talleb debated one and apparently kicked his arse so badly that he was almost reduced to tears.

 

[IdleRich]

In fact, now I think about it, I really like a lot of what he said about certain things. Definitely made me think about what was important and significant in certain fields and what you maybe thought you could ignore but actually can't and vice versa.

Like when he's talking about a trader who followed this particular strategy which was fairly cautious but brought in approximately one million pounds of profit every year for his twenty year career. The only bad year was one time when there were these really unusual market conditions, and Talleb was saying that a lot of people will talk about that guy and say "he was successful all the time except for one time and that was a freek and so he should be seen as a good trader" and Talleb says "No, he's not good cos on that one "freak" day he lost a thousand times more than he made in the rest of his caereer. That's the important number, you can't discount it cos it only happened once cos the size of what happened means it more important than everything else he did.*

And I do think that he's right on that, people think that you can discount things that didn't happen often, but you can't if they are significant.
I gusse he makes two points about that which are related and look similar but actually. One is that when a freak event happens, even if if it is due to an incredible confluence of events it can't be disregarded or somehow not counted just cos it's rare cos it's size is so large as to make it significant even so... and the other thing which is much more obvious but which people were totally unwilling to accept is that
the models were wrong and the evidence was there, people would say that the company is safe unless the volatility goes to there and the model says that that will only happen once in a million years - and Talleb will be going well how the fuck did it happen three times in the last twenty years then?

Those are statistics and the importance was masked for some by the frequency. But II remember seeing and interview with Ashley Cole and thinking it was somehow similar - he was talking about England v Brazil and he said Ronaldinho did kinda trick me then and he got that half a yard on me, but I've figured him out, let's see him try that again. And I was thinking "yeah, but that was the word cup, he scored, you got knocked out, he don't need to try it again, that was the one, that was THE moment". He hadn't grasped that even if they met a hundred times int he future and Cole got him every time it would never make up for that one second.



I am really high but I think there may have still been some stuff worth reading in there somewhere. If not, apologies.




*Was it Brass Eye or something when it had that guy who worksd in a swimming pool recounting his career and he had this really monotonous voice going "1976 noone died, 1977 no-one died, 1978 no-one died, 1979 no-one died, 1980 noone died, 1981 no-one died, 1982 no-one died, 1983 no-one died, 1984 no-one died, 1985 unfortunately I wasn't paying attention and a busload of kids did break in and started messing around in the pool while I was on my lunch break and 215 innocent children drowned - it's literally exactly the same thing.