I saw this going viral: “They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”~ @nntaleb https://t.co/bJLxHLCYBS — Zhuo Xi (@birdxi1988) March 13, 2024 Under the timed conditions of an IQ test, eliminating false patterns or noise… Continue reading ‘Coachability’ does not refute IQ

It has been a while since I updated about my Bitcoin shorting method. To recap: at the start of the trading session, 6:30 AM PST, I short Bitcoin and go long QQQ/NDX_100 in equal size. So for a $100k portfolio this would entail buying $50k of QQQ/NDX_100 and shorting $50k of Bitcoin. Both legs are… Continue reading How to break-even shorting Bitcoin in a bull market

Item #1: Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy Raising Another $500M to Buy More Bitcoin. Plot twist: this is just a front to acquire the world’s largest private supply of cocaine.This sounds like a Ponzi or pyramid scheme in the making: raise money to buy more Bitcoin, which causes the price of Bitcoin and MicroStrategy stock to rise,… Continue reading The Daily View: 3/13/2024

Eli Lilly does not want its new weight loss drugs to be used for vanity purposes: Eli Lilly's new ad says weight loss drugs aren't meant for vanity purposes. https://t.co/xCIQChRbR9 — CBS News (@CBSNews) March 8, 2024 This is so disingenuous of Eli Lilly. The ineluctable reason these new weight loss drugs are a hundred-billion-dollar… Continue reading New Weight Loss Drugs: Of Course It’s About Vanity

In 1997 IBM made headlines worldwide after its supercomputer, Deep Blue, beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a 6-game match. In 2006 IBM researcher David Ferrucci created Watson, as a successor to Deep Blue, who had high hopes Watson would revolutionize healthcare, but like Deep Blue, it was a sort of solution looking for a… Continue reading Don’t beat yourself up for missing out on AI or Nvidia hype

It looks like ‘go woke go broke’ has come for Google now. Even I was not expecting the PR fallout from the woke Gemini chatbot and the consequent decline of Google stock to be so bad, which is still ongoing. To recap, Google’s Gemini chatbot went haywire and produced historically implausible or impossible images in… Continue reading ‘Go Woke Go Broke’ Comes for Google

Bitcoin crash is resuming, down from a high of $69k to $63k as of writing this. Anyone can see that Bitcoin has a long history of suddenly crashing, like in May 2021 and all of 2022. Was I wrong earlier this year, yes, but 10 months remain for 2024, which is an eternity in the… Continue reading Bitcoin Update: Crash Resumes at 69k. 2021 all over again?

The topic of delayed family formation often comes up in the news, but especially on online discussions such as Reddit: Why are so many Americans delaying having children, or not having any at all? I posit workaholism is at the root of this problem. Rather than ‘amusing ourselves to death’, it’s more like we’re working… Continue reading Blame Incentives for Delayed Family Formation

Item #1: Given that this fact coexists with relatively low obesity rates in Africa, this should serve as a reminder of how unhealthy being fat is and how much medical care has made a difference for the survival of obese people. pic.twitter.com/YzBzitbA4S — Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) March 1, 2024 Africa has a higher all-cause mortality, as… Continue reading The Daily View, 3/1/2024: Twitter Edition

From the NYTs: How the Media Industry Keeps Losing the Future. I take the opposite view: legacy media has thrived, especially post-Trump, whereas smaller companies are struggling, like Vice Media, which was valued at $4 billion in 2018 and is now worthless. Legacy media is booming due to a fixed supply of established outlets and… Continue reading Why legacy media is thriving