The wise men

Once upon a time, some time ago, there were a group of men who were very very rich and owned around 40% of the world's resources. They had land, industries, gold and what not. They were wise and understood how to maintain and grow their wealth throughout time. They very well knew that value is in the thought of the beholder. If the thought of value in something vanishes, the value in the product is zero. To further help themselves, they thought upon an idea to globalise the world to make use and exploit the best of everything. Further, they spread the benefits of globalisation and free market access. At this point of time, they realised that with free markets, value is being interfered by the exchange rates. The group of wise men, decided that they will have to be proactive and move as a group to maintain order and control of the maintenance and growth of their precious valuables in the world. Since they own a substantial part of the world, and markets are never deep enough for them, they could influence the markets with ease. Moreover, they realise the people's psychology and the various govt.'s response to the situations they would create. They start buying into an 'item' initially and start spreading the word how that would be the next 'big' thing in the world. The high risk takers and loyalists start buying it immediately. As the value of the 'item' increases, more people start believing the prophecy and start buying it while all the while the wise men's value increases. After a few years, the wise men believe that they have milked the 'item' to its limit and their value has stopped growing at a fast rate. Further, before someone else calls that the 'item' is overvalued, they start selling the 'item' and buying into another 'item'. And the next prophecy of how this item is undervalued and how it is the next 'big' thing, starts to grow. This cycle keeps repeating over periods of time and the only people who are always in the green are the wise men and the loyalists, while the general public is bled and slaughtered each time when they start buying at the height of the cycle and when the wise men are selling it to the blind public. These "items" could be various currencies, gold, silver, commodities, bonds, houses, land and what not. The frequency with which these wise men are interchanging the 'items' has increased in the recent years. It is not clear whether another set of 'wise men' are on the street trying to call shots on an item which is different from the first set of wise men. This fight between the two sets of wise men having contradictory ideas on some 'items' is probably being seen in the high volatility of the markets. E.g: Crude oil falling by around 6% in a week, INR moving by 1% in a day, gold falling by over 9% in 5 days.

Moral of the story: Besides the all the financial porn being thrown by the media at us and all the talk of finding value, in the end it seems you just have to stick to the side of the 'wise men' if you want to make money/store value. If only, we could easily pinpoint who are these 'wise men' and know their next move.

P.S: This is just one of the hypothesis I have to show that most people have know idea of how the market could be working against you all the time. At times, I feel like one of the little guys who feel like they are born to just get exploited by the 'wise men'.

Lift kara de

I overheard a very interesting conversation while in a lift. I heard one guy saying: The lift takes more energy to take a person going down than a person going up. The logic is that the lifts usually have a big counter-balance attached to it. The counter-balance always goes in the opposite direction of the lift. If the lift goes up, the counter-balancing weight goes down and vice-versa. So while you and the lift has to go down, the heavy counter-balance has to be lifted and hence is very energy intensive. So the next time, walk down and go up in lift to save some electricity.

Ideal personality: Why MBTI is so not right..

When I first knew about the MBTI test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator) and that I was supposed to take it, I thought I was definitely strong in some areas and was kind of in the middle for some of the other parameters.

I was administered the MBTI test at my management school and I found it very hard to choose one of the two answers when asked to choose from. I had fair amount of instances on either side and if it was another day, I could have as well ticked the other option. With many a questions in limbo, I didnt really feel the test helped in testing me, or I was not quite the normal guy falling quite clearly in such sharp black and white categories (as it should have been perhaps).

Somewhere down the line in the last 1.5 years, I have been able to see that all for each pair of MBTI, one preference or the other is more beneficial depending on the circumstances. Sometimes, keeping your mouth shut helps to prevent further embarrassment and trouble, while at times going out of way to shout out your point is beneficial.

 

Similar with Sensing and iNtution. Wiki says { Individuals who prefer sensing are more likely to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: that is, information that can be understood by the five senses. They tend to distrust hunches, which seem to come "out of nowhere". They prefer to look for details and facts. For them, the meaning is in the data. On the other hand, those who prefer intuition tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information. } Again this preference is and should be based on the situation (or atleast that is how I have always used it). Without intution, how else can one even try to understand such vague things like atoms, their chemistry, radio frequencies, nuclear physics, integration and differentiation in mathematics, visions of leaders, faith on god, etc. On the other hand, how can you ever make a sound decision without any basis. Both extremes seem ridiculous.

If you think over it, even the other two pairs will be like that.

 

MBTI test says that these are personal preferences only and nobody can be a perfectly any of the 16 different conmbinations and it is not strictly a type to be classified into. People do exhibit both sides of a pair. The point why then classify it like that? Why not have three things instead of a pair. The third should be the center region in between the extremes of the pair.

And that I think is the perfect personality!

A person capable of being in neither of the MBTIs, but right in the center for all the four pairs and one who feels most confused as to what he really is after being given the test. He will be the most suitable in the ever so dynamic situations of the current and future worlds where prefering different ways to different situations and maybe even different ways for same situation at a different time is required. [If you understood the last statement, I assure you that you will qualify as "intelligent and wise" in Ajit's Intelligence test ;) ]

A perfect personality is a flecible one capable of handling a delicate as well as a hard situation. He is flexible in approach and knows when to stick to what and what is to be achieved. Extrovert helps in life to make new friends and contacts and achieve the unimaginable but being introvert and doing your own work is beneficial when you have a job in hand to complete all by yourself. The perfect personality should be able to do the right mix of both extremes right one after another or sometimes even simultanoeusly. e.g: Being introvert while being extrovert like when you go to a party and introduce yourself or make an effort to meet up someone(extrovert behaviour) but hardly talk anything (introvert behaviour). It is in a way like playing good cop, bad cop alone and seeing which is the best way the situation can be handled and then choosing the suitable role.

A good hedge

Crazy as it sounds, alcohol may one day be given to people with brain injuries to help them recover.

The idea has arisen from a study of 38,000 people with head injuries, which found that those with alcohol in their blood were more likely to survive. For every 100 people who died when stone-cold sober, only 88 died with ethanol – the kind of alcohol in drinks – in their veins.

"The finding raises the intriguing possibility that administering ethanol to patients with brain injuries may improve outcome," conclude the investigators.

Lead researcher Ali Salim of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said he hoped a trial could be mounted, but more information is needed first. "We need a better understanding of the exact mechanism, the appropriate dose and specific timing of treatment before we can embark on clinical trials," he told New Scientist.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17820-bash-your-head-you-need-a-stiff-drink.html

Confusion is king

Over the last week, I met quite a lot of people (people I know over a decade or people I have known very closely). After all the meetings, I had a lot of confusions about a lot of things and about life in general. I even argued that confusion is good because it is the critical state where you decide that the current state is not good/stable enough and you are thinking of taking steps to a better tomorrow. So it is a way to become better leaving aside the present/past things. But confusion can also be bad. It keeps you in a state where you dont do anything towards either of the steps or directions as you are not sure what is it that you want to pursue. There is no certain goal or aim and without a goal or aim, implementation steps are useless. After seeing both sides, I was confused whether confusion itself is good or bad. As one of my profs. remarked about a theory which states that equilibriums are only momentary states in the dominant state of chaos.

The economics related to womens' legs

I for one have not observed hemlines of skirts for so long to make any useful inferences. But there have been many who have taken cues from watching womens' legs. According to the skirt length theory, when skirts get shorter, it's time to buy; when skirts get longer, it's time to sell. The logic behind this indicator dictates that positive markets lead to a happy nation and an atmosphere of fun. Fun times send hemlines rising, making micro minis great for the markets, while conservative floor-length dresses are bad news. Fact or Fiction? When times are good, fashions do indeed tend to show skin. The bad news is that fashions don't change until times are good, making this a lagging indicator. If you are buying and selling based on skirt length, you might be better off selling when skirts are high and buying when they are low. I have a question though, why are shorter skirts costlier than longer skirts, considering that the material costs of longer skirts are more than that of the shorter skirts(sometimes the material used is twice or even thrice the micro mini skirts). Assuming the material of the skirt is ignored, it just doesn't make sense. Maybe it is all based on perceptions and confidence and outlook of the people - all psychological factors.

The paradigm based on a single example

I was struck by this paradigm maybe a month ago when one of my classmates here made a statement while we were walking on the road "This car belongs to the govt." The inference was based on the fact that the nameplate of the car had something kind of written as philippinas govt. on a not so nice looking green background and a picture of some tower in it. I just looked around and noticed that all the cars here have that kind of a name board. Meaning that all the cars that are registered in Philippines have that kind of a nameplate. The classmate had inferred a theory based on one single datapoint. She had fallen for the "fallacy of one example" More on the same topic at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/inflogic/onesided.htm As mentioned in the above topic,

The one-sidedness fallacy does not make an argument invalid. It may not even make the argument unsound. The fallacy consists in persuading readers, and perhaps ourselves, that we have said enough to tilt the scale of evidence and therefore enough to justify a judgment. If we have been one-sided, though, then we haven't yet said enough to justify a judgment. The arguments on the other side may be stronger than our own. We won't know until we examine them.

So the one-sidedness fallacy doesn't mean that your premises are false or irrelevant, only that they are incomplete. You may have appealed only to relevant considerations, but you haven't yet appealed to all relevant considerations.

Getting back, why am I writing about this now? I just came back from a visiting professor (from a good American University)'s lecture and I am appalled by what she said. She too despite being a prof. for so many years fell for the same fallacy when she told that Lehman Brothers went out of business because they did not have a corporate social responsibility. And one needs that to be doing CSR to stay in the business for long. Well, maybe the Professoree did not know that Lehman Brothers was a 150 year old company. Just because it failed, you cannot blame it on not doing CSR. Such a pathetic example she had given, and that too being a professor. Maybe she doesnt even understand and know what poverty, pollution, etc is in the first place and then to do CSR to eradicate them. What a pathetic BS class early in the morning...

Estimates

"Knowing others to know yourself" Well, that seems cliched and as if another person is a mirror. Well, today, I asked a classmate how much time it took to complete a certain topic that is to be done for tomorrow. The person replied with "2 hrs" and "I don't know how useful this input will be for you". If I am right by choosing a candidate of around equal intelligence, interest in the subject and motive, then I should take the same time to complete that topic. The reasons it will vary are because of the variable parameters like sleepiness, tiredness and the difference between the estimated and actual differences in the intelligence, interest in the subject and motive. If there is a big difference between the time, analyse why is the difference. Was there a wrong basic assumption which needs to be corrected? If so, do it. You are now one more step towards perfection of estimating your time based on other's time. I have always been a staunch believer in using this theory to get an estimate of how much time I will require to do chapters that I don't even have an idea of. On all the previous emergency times(read before the exam day), this technique has been very useful to me. So start getting to know others well :)

Schrodinger's girlfriend

http://noenthuda.com/blog/?p=530

Unifying the ladders

Please make sure to read the previous post to understand this one. http://noenthuda.com/blog/?p=996

Ladder Theory

A very interesting theory... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_theory