Business & Money

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve caught a few glimpses of figure staking as part of the 2018 Winter Olympics. The interesting thing to me about figure skating is that you get style points and better scores for higher levels of difficulty. 3 spins in the air is better than two and higher elevation during jumps is better than lower.

Investing is not like figure skating. You get no extra points for degree of difficulty. If our portfolios are both up the same percentage over the course of the year, it doesn’t matter if you found some obscure value play while I just held Apple or Amazon.

All you have to do is maximize returns with the lowest possible risk. It’s really that simple.

Human Progress

Times tables are stupid! Or so some people think.

I was recently speaking to my fifth-grade math teacher, and she mentioned an interesting debate happening in educational circles. With a tool like a calculator, which, of course, exists as an app on any smartphone, why would any child need to memorize their times tables? It’s an interesting question.

On the one hand, the calculator is computationally superior to a human being in every way. We’ve built tools as such to augment our own abilities and thus can reallocate our energy to things better suited to us.

On the other, the inability to do simple multiplication in one’s head might lead to problems. The example my teacher gave was, if a student doesn’t know that 5 x 11 = 55, then they might struggle with more complex equations. If for example they were faced with the problem “50 x 11”, they might incorrectly key in 50 x 12 on the calculator yielding an answer of 600. And without the baseline level of knowledge about the simpler equation, they might not immediately know they did something wrong.

The above example is fairly rudimentary, but it points to a larger idea. Having a baseline level of knowledge and understanding seems crucial to higher order thinking. And what’s more important than simply memorizing the answer of 5 x 11, is the process by which students might learn to memorize that result. Back when I was learning my times tables, the easiest way for me was to learn by combinations. 5 x 10 is easy, and 5 x 1 is easy, so I developed the ability to just learn the most basic equations, and quickly sum the totals to arrive at more complex answers.

What I just described is the process of “learning how to learn.” I imagine other students had different methods and approaches to learning various subjects that worked best for them.

With the speed at which we’re developing new tools and technologies to augment our own abilities, it’s so crucial to learn how to learn.

Philosophy

I was recently listening to an episode of Waking Up with Sam Harris. Sam was being interviewed by Russell Brand (yes, THE Russell Brand, the English comedian and actor from “Get Him To The Greek,” interviewing the renowned public intellectual Sam Harris who’s most known as an outspoken atheist).

One particularly intriguing segment had to do with the treatment of women in the Muslim world. Sam, being an atheist and particularly outspoken against the Islamic faith, spoke about how women are “forced to wear bags on their heads” (presumably referring to the hijab) as a result of religious dogmatism.

Brand then comes back with an interesting point of his own. He points out that Sam, having 2 daughters, might be focusing on the wrong issues facing women in today’s society. Issues that are much closer to home.

“Why are you not more concerned by the continual objectification of women and the commodification of female sexuality, the advertising industry using females purely as props?… Which one is more prominent? Which one is more likely to happen to your daughters? That she’s going to be whisked off to Afghanistan to be wife number 5, or that she’s going to have sex with some dickhead because she’s got daddy issues.”

I believe this to be a critically important question (and one that I don’t pretend to know the answer to). It’s basically the question of, “can you weigh human suffering?” Is the suffering faced by women in America more or less important than that faced by women in other parts of the world?

Would it make you cold-blooded or apathetic if you chose to focus on one problem over the other?

My Latest Discovery

If you live in Brooklyn along the L train, you’re fully aware of the impending shutdown coming in spring 2019. But, perhaps all hope is not lost. Check out this Kickstarter.