DLD 2012 has started today in Munich and runs until Jan. 24th. In it, people as diverse as Sheryl Sandberg, Arianna Huffington, the Dyson family and Hiroshi Mikitani share their views on what matters to them. The themes are varied and the program is packed with interesting talks and panels. In the age of multi-disciplinary events, this is one of the best.
Less than 24h after publishing our rant on Economic models, we get John Kay’s brilliant piece in our inbox – “A wise man knows one thing – the limits of his knowledge”. It is the ultimate summary of the many dangers of modelling in general, not just in economics – among which dangers we count over-complicating things, but most importantly over-estimating a model’s value as predictive/forecasting tool. In fact, as the article argues and as we’ve seen countless times, we tend to over-estimate models even in their ability to analyze the past, especially if one is asking the wrong questions. We also cite a few quotes by Taleb and an article on Edge.org by Emanuel Derman.
“Nothing substitutes for thinking”, as Munger and Buffett have said, and someone has also said that “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Two follow-ups to recent posts: Not to be outdone by our recent post about reading lists, Booz & Co.’s Best Business Books 2011 feature is a sprawling selection of books covering Management, Economics, Marketing, Ethics and other business-oriented fields. And it appears that the speed of light is indeed in question, as recent studies were able to repeat the first experiment’s results.
Read more about Follow-up: reading lists and the speed of light
The UN expects “Earthling #7 Billion” to be born this week – the report will be released on Tuesday, Oct. 26th 2011. Yet it’s just a symbol to spark a stream of articles about overpopulation – demographics, at this level, is open to much debate. Clive Cookson in the Financial Times had a short piece with a brilliant infographic, and the New York Times today has an entire debate series about it. We link to other sources. Not being able to reach a conclusion is no excuse not to think about it.
In what is admittedly light reading after yesterday’s trouncing of the equity markets – but loyal readers have read our “Don’t panic” post, right? – there’s bound to be intense debate around this proposition by scientists: it IS, apparently, possible to achieve speeds in excess of the speed of light in a vacuum (at least for neutrinos, that is). It was considered impossible until now (you know, E=mc2) and, if confirmed, it may change quite a few theories. Talk about a ‘black swan’ of enormous proportions. It’s one of those occasions where we’re supposed to remind you to seek the source material, remain skeptical and filter the signal from the noise. However, the ‘multidisciplinary geek’ in us wants to see some scientific foundations shaken up.
We’ve been arguing that “to finish first, first you must finish” for over twenty years. We’ve also recently argued for cash as a strategic weapon with both defensive and offensive features: it is as much “cushion” as it is “cannon”. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has given a lecture recently and the main takeaway is this: “(…) you live long by not dying, you win in chess by not losing—by letting the other person lose. So negative investment is not a sissy strategy. It is an active one.” He also highlighted the planning fallacy, something David Brooks wrote about even more recently, so we’re taking the opportunity to post both together.
The “Epicurean Dealmaker” comments to a Tim Harford article in the Financial Times – both worth the time. It highlights that science is increasingly about multidisciplinary collaboration, with its pros and cons. The risk is that scientists are becoming so specialized that no one can know enough about each piece of the puzzle, so it gets harder to check and to innovate. There will be no more Da Vincis, argues Tim Harford. In such a specialized world, the quest to achieve as much of a multidisciplinary knowledge as possible – as argued by Feynman in the introductory quote and by Charlie Munger repeatedly over the years – gains importance day by day.
Interesting preliminary finding by researchers looking at 18,000 professional basketball games: ending the first half losing by one point actually increases a team’s chance of winning the game. If a team was winning by 4 points at halftime, the chance of winning the full game was 70%. If the advantage was 6 points, the chance of winning jumped to 80%. However, when the margin was 1 point then the team had a better chance of losing… The study seems well done, but take it with a grain of salt before applying it to motivational “tools” inside your company.
BigThink.com has two interesting videos on Education. We’ve written before about the future/ quality of Education, and Salman Khan is the subject of the first video, a much shorter version of the TED speech we posted before. From the first video we navigated to another one, this time with Harvard’s Louis Menand. Customization/data analytics coming to Education is great news.
The web is making it easier to fund/ develop companies that aren’t web-based at all, and actually make tangible products. In the words of an MIT professor, “The situation resembles the way that anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can now start a Web-based company” – and we all know what innovation and wealth creation can come out of that “mold”.
