There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanWhen individuals express a desire for a stress-free life, I often remind them of two things: First, the only beings without stress are no longer living. Second, when you plot stress against performance, you observe an inverse U-shaped curve. At zero stress, performance is at its lowest.
I give all of you permission whereby, if I change the way I behave, my beliefs, the way we are going, I give you permission to hit me in my face, you need to bring me back to reality.
When you observe chimpanzees and other apes, you see how extremely humanlike they are in almost everything they do. We have been so indoctrinated to think we are special (as a species) that when you see an ape up close and see they are- in essence- us, you don't know what to do with those feelings.
There is a naïve form which doesn't recognise the bubble, and thinks that real-estate will go up forever. There is then a second order overconfidence where someone recognises a bubble but feels they will escape it when other people don't.
I can illustrate the current situation in the form of a story. Two boys were being chased by a Tiger. One boy stops to put on running shoes, and the other boy says, 'What are you doing?' The first boy responds, 'I don't have to outrun the Tiger, I just have to outrun you'.
The standard models were formulated through a process that started well before computers were in place, and I would say it's undergone a certain lock-in. Once you start going down that path, it's hard to break out of it to another path. As a result, economics is stuck. It's not even that the existing models are wrong, they're just very limited in what they can do, and mainstream economists have gotten very locked in to using those models – and only those models.
To break into the chain, you would have to amass 25,000 of the world's fastest supercomputers. That seems completely infeasible. This is one of the big advantages of BitCoin – the ledger is practically unhackable.
Before you think about the alpha, you have to think about the client's beta.
If dreams are brain-generated, then understanding brain activity during sleep becomes crucial. This continuous activity during certain sleep phases, especially those associated with vivid dreams, is so intense it resembles waking brain activity, a phenomenon dubbed paradoxical sleep. It challenges the notion that the brain 'rests' during sleep.
The most common misunderstanding is that the Arctic is just a frozen wilderness with a lot of ice and glaciers and a few polar bears roaming. On the contrary the Arctic is a very diverse part of our planet with multiple resources and economic opportunities, the home for over four million people of different nationalities and diverse ethnic origin.
The USD is the world's most liquid currency, used as the tool of choice for global finance. It is for that reason that we, as observers, must pay great attention to policy changes such as this.
We have to recognise that if we ignore or downplay the human side, we could lose. That, I think, is really the key insight for why and how things should be done differently.