Fooled by Randomness Nassim Taleb

Nassim Taleb's book pulls the curtain back on our brain's inability to sort out brilliant performance from random luck.  He points out that if you follow 5000 people who pick stocks for a living by pure chance 150 of them will outperform the stock market for 5 straight years.  They will be thought of as brilliant and they can write books on how they did it.  Next year when half of them fail to out perform the market people will say they became to comfortable with their success and lost their edge. 

Nassim does recognize that some talent like the learned ability to play a musical instrument is not random. 

He does point out that this randomness must also be applied to alternative medicine.  When we can get a placebo cure rate 30 to 40% above background the bar is set fairly high for alternative medicine.  He is even more blunt stating there is medicine and there are things that are not medicine.

Nassim Taleb - Fooled by Randomness - 7 min.

 

Nassim is independently wealthy from betting on some black swan events in the stock market.  This gives him the freedom to do what he loves which is talk to other brilliant people and write books about his experience.  It also gives him the freedom to be very blunt and step on toes.  I'll paraphrase him now but his impression the television analysts on the stock market is that they are pure entertainers with no skin in the game.  As a consequence their advice is of no consequence. 

I'll be reading more of his books in the future.  Of particular interest is his latest book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

Nassim Taleb's book, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets is available from Amazon.com.

Nassim Taleb - Criticizes Summers, Bernanke and Obama

Stiff by Mary Roach

Mary Roach's curiosity about science and cadavers are on full display in her book Stiff.   It is not a book for those who have difficulty dealing with graphic descriptions of decayed bodies.  If you have the stomach, it is an excellent science and history lesson on what happens to our bodies after we die.  I enjoyed her book Packing for Mars so I decided to give this book a try.   Mary's wit and levity keeping the topic from being too clinical or boring.

Human cadavers are put to use as crash dummies, a teaching tools for plastic surgeons and medical students.  They are used to advance forensic medicine and assist others with organ and tissue donation.  Are bodies are very useful after we die.

I her history of body snatchers and resurrectioners to be surprising.  In the past, medical schools found cadavers to be in short supply so they would often pay for bodies and ask very few questions.  This led to one enterprising duo to turn it into a profitable business by murdering people in a boarding house and delivering the bodies for a fee.  Other med students would be encouraged by professors to snatch recently buried bodies from graves.  This led to an interesting side business for funeral homes making cages and concrete crypts to make it harder to retrieve a body.  These were often purchased by the very medical doctors that were teaching anatomy classes.

A big think interview with Author Mary Roach - 30 minutes

  

The book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is available from Amazon.com.

Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis

Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis

 

The individuals who founded the United States are covered in sufficient detail to provide an excellent background into early US history.   The tragic Raymond Burr and Alexander Hamilton duel is covered in great detail.  The debates over how to handle slavery and the decision to put it off until later were noted.  I found the idea of compensating southern slave owners for the freedom of the slaves to be less bloody outcome than the Civil War. 

These financial and moral considerations were similar to those made prior to the second world war.  The US was reluctant to criticize Germany in the 1930's because it wanted loans paid back.  A criticism of the Nazi mistreatment of Jews would have also opened the US to criticism for its continued mistreatment of African Americans.



Sheep at Mount Vernon 2012 - photo N. Carlson

This book increased my curiosity about both George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.  As a result I subsequently read their biographies and toured Mount Vernon.

Founding Brothers - Part of PBS series (15 min)

The book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation is available from Amazon.com

The Little Book of Talent by Nathan Coyle

The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle offers tips on improving hard and soft skills.  He discovered these while reporting for five years on talent hotbeds around the world.  His tips focus on getting started, improving skills and sustaining progress.  

Hard skills are those that require practiced repetition.  An example would be shooting a basketball or playing a musical instruments.  Soft skills include the need to improvise or think on your feet.  These include managing people, raising children, creating new music or dance.   He describes the hard skills as the trunk of the tree and the soft skills as the branches.

He recommends watching and observing someone who is better than you are at a specific skill then attempt it.  Other authors have noted that you will fail to  exactly mimic the other person but you will become better and develop your own style. 

Coaching with vivid short examples

 

Use vivid images

 

He recommends that you stretch yourself by going to the sweet spot between easy and overwhelming difficulty.  Other's have described this as the Goldilocks zone.  He also notes that child prodigies often burn out because they fail to take the risks needed and think of talent as a gift rather than something that requires focused practice and effort.  Other authors have noted that children do better if they are told that they are good at learning from mistakes rather than having a fixed trait of being intelligent.

Book Summary from Main Take Away

The book, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills is available from Amazon.com.

Jeannie Out of the Bottle

 

Barbara Eden offers a frank glimpse of her life in and out of show business.  From her traumatic miscarriage and the loss of her son to drugs to her fun on the TV show.  She describes her brief one show stint on the Lucy Show.  She noted that Lucille Ball was very professional and completely involved in her show.  Lucy even personally altered Barbara's dress on the show to make sure it looked good.  Barbara kept her relationship with Lucy's husband and all of her costars strickly professional. 

 

She describes meeting JFK's handlers and being very clear that she did not want to take part in any extra curricular activities.  She meet Elvis and Marilyn Monroe at various times in their lives.  Barbara shared a body double with Marilyn.  She met Elvis when he was young and very proper.  When she met the older Elvis she was saddened by the toll that pep pills and other drugs had taken on his body and spirit.   She enjoyed her time touring with Bob Hope on the USO tours.

 

As for I Dream of Jeannie,  Barbara enjoyed the show and Larry Hagman even though is behavior on the set was less than exemplary.

 

 

Barbara Reads and except from her book.

 

The book Jeannie Out of the Bottle is available from Amazon.com.

Changeology by Dr. John C. Norcross

Dr. John C. Norcross uses peer reviewed literature to break down the process of change into its component parts.  He assumes that someone is at least open to change as it is pointless to consider change if there is no motivation.  The first stages involve raising awareness and planning. The next stage is actually attempting to take action.  The last stages involve the maintenance of change until it becomes a habit that does not require effort.  He breaks them into psych, prep, perspire, persevere and persist.

The five steps of change

He discusses catalysts for change and notes that different ones are required for different stages.  Rewards are needed during the take action phase.  Pondering and self examination are needed in the raising awareness and planning stage.  However going into full ponder mode during the action stage grinds things to a halt.  Offering rewards during the planning stage prevents any action being taken.

Sustaining change

He provides an excellent website Changeologybook.com with exercises to assist people with the process of change.  He also lists his favorite apps and his favorite movies focused on people dealing with difficult change.  I watched one of the recent films Rachel Getting Married about a young woman returning to her family for her sisters wedding after a stint in drug rehabilitation.  It kept my attention even though the subject matter was not pleasant

For Lent our Methodist church is reviewing Romans chapter 12 and using it as a guide to change the mind, body and spirit.  This book is an excellent complement to that process. We are most productive in the morning because we have the most willpower after a night's sleep.

The book Changeology: 5 Steps to Realizing Your Goals and Resolutions is available from Amazon.com

The Upside of Irrationality - Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely's follow-up to his book Predictably Irrational is meant to look at the positive side of our irrational behavior.  He also looks at the dark side.  People apparently activate a very strong pleasure center in the brain when we act out revenge.  This behavior or a sense of fair play is present in both humans and primates.  Often an act out of revenge harms the person doing the act as much as it does the intended target. 

The Case for Revenge

 

He also examines motivation to do labor. If people realize that there work has no perceived meaning and/or they receive little encouragement they will work for shorter periods of time and produce less. Managers can use this knowledge to effectively demotivate employees and reduce job satisfaction.

The Meaning of Labor

 
People love their own ideas and resist the ideas of others.  Thomas Edison's rejection of Tesla's AC current idea is a famous example.  The invention of the electric chair was covertly funded by Edison to show the dangers of AC current.




The not invented here bias

 

Because we are irrational and our anecdotal experience can not be trusted we need to test everything to determine if it is in fact true.

 

Lessons from our irrationalities

The book, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home is available from Amazon.com