Secure Scuttlebutt

Group blog thinking about investment management and reality. https://www.epsilontheory.com/ (more)

Ben Hunt: The Long Now, Pt. 3 - Is This Normal? Asking for a Friend. Today’s note is about the micro. Today’s note is about getting back to the Real. (more)

Ben Hunt: Too Clever By Half. The smartest animals on my farm aren’t really on my farm at all. They’re the coyotes who live in the woods. (more)

Ben Hunt: Virtue Signaling, or … Why Clinton is in Trouble. Common Knowledge today: Donald Trump is the Yoko Ono of the Republican Party. Common Knowledge tomorrow: Hillary Clinton is the Yoko Ono of the Democratic Party. (more)

Virtue signaling is the expression of a conspicuous, self-righteous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character... According to the Cambridge Dictionary, virtue signalling is "an attempt to show other people that you are a good person, for example by expressing opinions that will be acceptable to them, especially on social media... indicating that one has virtue merely by expressing disgust or favour for certain political ideas or cultural happenings".[4] The expression is often used to imply by the user that the virtue being signalled is exaggerated or insincere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Kevin Yien: Finding Your Swagger. What is swagger? For me, it's knowing what you're good at and acting accordingly — earned confidence. But it's not arrogance. Your behavior and ability are in lock step. (more)

Ben Hunt: Always Go To the Funeral. Going to the funeral is part of the social contract we have with our families, our friends, and our tribe, both immediate and extended. It’s part of the social contract we have with ourselves. It’s part of the personal obligation that we have to others, obligation that doesn’t fit neatly or at all into our bizarro world of crystalized self-interest. (more)

Erik Hoel: Writing for outlets isn't worth it anymore. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. (more)

A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out To Be Based On Fake Data. A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than the end, they were less likely to lie... The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior. (more)

Ben Hunt: Why Am I Reading This NOW? Do I think that both China and Russia are bad actors through and through? Do I think their cadres and apparatchiks will stop at nothing to promote their state interests and undermine the state interests of the United States? YES. Do I ALSO think that Western governments and their cadres and apparatchiks – including their useful idiots in the media – will stop at nothing to promote their state interests? Yes. Yes, I do. (more)

Rusty Guinn: A Man Must Have a Code. One such Britticism was the idea that any person who wants to be consistently successful as a human being, and especially as an investor, must have a World View. (more)

Ben Hunt: Critical State Theory. I believe two things... (more)

chatbot competition, similar to Turing test

Bayan Abu Shawar and Eric Atwell: A chatbot system as a tool to animate a corpus. ELIZA... Loebner prize competition (more)

Tim Ferriss: What Evernote's Phil Libin Learned from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Others. We met up, and I remember, you took a photograph of the menu, which was on the wall. And shortly thereafter, you were able to search all of the text. And I was like, okay, I get it. And then, I think I started with depaperfying or trying to remove the clutter of my house at that time. So it was all of the business cards, all of the legal paperwork, accounting paperwork. I just scanned it because I knew I didn’t have to really organize it per se if I could search by the text that was scanned. (more)

part of Tim Leary's SMIILE formula (more)

The area of space around a celestial body that is dominated by the body's gravitational field. (more)

fictional detective (more)

In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.[1][2][3] As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy