abovee 1%

cooking at finance & ai

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

2 men win the Nobel Prize in economics 2 years apart. They agree on almost everything political. Then one of them sits down in front of a camera and says the other one is wrong about money, which is the only thing either of them is famous for.

The man talking is Friedrich Hayek. Born in Vienna in 1899, wounded on the Italian front in the first world war, and he wrote the book that made his name while working in London during the second.

His objection is not that Friedman's numbers are off. It is more awkward than that. Hayek argues the quantity of money is not a thing you can measure well enough to steer by, because what counts as money keeps changing shape depending on what people are willing to accept as payment.

Which means the rule Friedman built his life on requires a number that Hayek says does not sit still long enough to be a number.

And then he goes further than the disagreement. If no central authority can measure it properly, his conclusion is not better measurement. It is that the measuring should not be done by one authority at all, and the proposal he wrote afterwards is still considered unthinkable.

4 minutes, and it is the clearest example on the internet of what an argument looks like between people who are on the same side.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

4 days after the worst single day in stock market history, a television host asks the chairman of Merrill Lynch, on air, why he did not warn his customers this was coming.

The answer is 4 words. I did not know.

Friday, 23 October 1987. Monday had taken 500 points off the Dow. Nobody in that studio knows yet whether this is a bad week or another 1929.

At 1:00 the chairman reaches for an image. A total eclipse of the sun. Every negative thing arriving at once, rare, total, brief. He is describing an event he cannot explain while it is still happening.

Then the old man speaks. John Templeton, 74, and he does not comfort anybody. If you never buy investments with borrowed money, he says, you can always be comfortable. Enthusiasm and pessimism arrive every 10 years. Without debt, none of it reaches you.

He was right. The market recovered within 2 years.

None of them knew that yet. One of them was calm anyway, not because he could see what was coming, but because he had arranged his life so that it could not reach him.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A student stands up in a Stanford lecture hall in 1979 and calls poverty a market failure. He is calm, he is prepared, and he has just handed the man on stage the exact opening he wanted.

What happens next was clipped, titled, and watched 700 thousand times. Almost nobody has seen the hour it came out of.

The exchange is worth studying with the sound off. The student is arguing a position. The professor is doing something else entirely, and he does it before answering anything.

He does not dispute the facts. He accepts them, then asks 1 question about a word the student used without defining it, and the whole argument reorganises around that word.

That move is the transferable part, and it has nothing to do with economics. Find the moment he decides which word to isolate, because everything after that is already decided.

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A student stands up in a Stanford lecture hall in 1979 and calls poverty a market failure. He is calm, he is prepared, and he has just handed the man on stage the exact opening he wanted.

What happens next was clipped, titled, and watched 700 thousand times. Almost nobody has seen the hour it came out of.

The exchange is worth studying with the sound off. The student is arguing a position. The professor is doing something else entirely, and he does it before answering anything.

He does not dispute the facts. He accepts them, then asks 1 question about a word the student used without defining it, and the whole argument reorganises around that word.

That move is the transferable part, and it has nothing to do with economics. Find the moment he decides which word to isolate, because everything after that is already decided.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

Sigmund Freud published more than 200 works between 1877 and 1900, none of which dealt with psychoanalysis. He was a neuroscientist and almost all of those works have never been translated into English.

The translation is being carried out by the man who is currently on stage. He is a neuropsychologist and his purpose in being there is not to defend Freud but to demonstrate the ideas which your textbooks attribute to someone else.

Embodied cognition, multiple memory systems, critical periods, and predictive processing—the idea that currently lies at the frontier of theoretical neuroscience this decade—he goes through each of them by showing the earlier version.

He then turns to him and at 34:33 states that the classification which Freud left us at the end of his life is completely incorrect and says the words out loud.

The highlight is at 36:21 and concerns a baby who stops feeding but continues to suck. Freud based half of his theory on that one moment, and Solms goes on to explain what it actually proves and what it does not prove.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/fJgVOFIBhG

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

Two Nobel Prize winners are in the same building, teach at the same school, and yet they disagree as to whether the thing that they both study actually exists. One of them was seated at a single table while being filmed.

One developed the theory according to which prices already include all that is knowable, while the other created the field which demonstrates that people are not the kind of beings that the theory demands. Neither of them has made any advances in forty years.

They are polite; that is why it is worth watching since no one raises their voice and yet each reply is a correction of the man opposite.

Search for the section dealing with bubbles. One of them states that the term has no practical meaning, while the other says of course they do exist. See which one of the two alters its definition during the answer.

What's most unusual is a closed-end fund which holds a variety of US assets. It has no connection with the country in its name and in 2014 its price did something that neither of the theories should allow for. They both have to explain it while being in the same room and on camera.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A fund manager looked at a country in which the largest companies were trading at 99% below the value of their assets. Although everyone said that the discount was due to the risk, he believed that the discount was a question which no one had taken the trouble to ask.

The question was simple: if these companies have such a high value yet cost so little, then is something being deducted from them and if so, by whom?

Therefore he developed a procedure for it, setting out the steps one by one. First read the filings, then determine what is missing, and afterwards interview the people who were involved in the move.

Search for the section in which he gives the reason why the most bureaucratic country in the world was the easiest place on earth to prove theft, the paperwork serving as the evidence.

He gives a figure for the amount that had been taken and compares it to the size of a country; he then explains what he did with it, namely that he published it, and the consequences that this had for him afterwards.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A psychologist convinced a group of adults that they had been lost in a shopping mall as children. They had not been. Some of them cried describing it.

The woman is Elizabeth Loftus, and the talk is called The Memory Factory. The title is not a metaphor. It is a job description.

Her work is embarrassingly simple to run. Show people something. Ask about it afterwards using slightly different words. A car that hit another car, or a car that smashed into it. The second group remembers broken glass that was never in the footage.

Then it scales. A single suggestive conversation is enough to install an entire event that never happened, and the person will add details you never gave them. Colours. Weather. What their mother said. The memory becomes richer over time, exactly the way a real one does.

There is no test that separates the 2 from the inside. Confidence does not do it. Emotion does not do it. Detail does not do it. The false ones often feel better.

For decades she was attacked for saying this, sued, threatened, and denounced by people who wanted memory to be a recording. She kept publishing.

Your most vivid childhood memory is not a file being opened. It is a story being rebuilt, right now, by a version of you who has reasons.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A fund manager watched his largest position fall from 15.75 to 4, and the only reason he kept his job is that it happened quickly. He had already phoned his mother and told her to buy it.

The man is Peter Lynch, and he is telling this on himself, out loud, on a stage in 1997.

The company is Kaiser Industries. The stock had already dropped from 29 to 17, and he asked himself how much lower it could possibly go. So he bought an enormous block at 15.75. It went to 10, and that is when he called his mother. Then 9, then 8, then 7, then 6, then 5, then 4.

He gives the room the vocabulary the industry uses for this. Being early is called premature. A correction is a euphemism for losing a lot of money rapidly. And if the whole collapse had taken years instead of 6 months, he says, he would have spent his life bagging groceries at Stop and Shop instead of running Fidelity.

Then the rule he pulled out of the wreck. The stock does not know you own it. Anyone who says they will sell once it gets back to what they paid is refusing a 66% return on the way up, and is waiting on a round number the thing may trade under for 26 years and never touch.

What saved him was not judgement. It was that the loss arrived fast enough to survive.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

At 14 he walked through estates being confiscated from Jewish families, carrying papers saying he was not one of them. At 62 he took more than a billion dollars out of the Bank of England in a single week.

Budapest, and the Germans have just arrived. His father is a prominent attorney who already lived through the Russian revolution, and he tells his son one thing.

This is a lawless occupation. The normal rules do not apply. You have to forget how you behave in a normal society.

Then he gets false papers for everyone in the family, a different arrangement for each of them.

George Soros is adopted on paper by an official of the Ministry of Agriculture. The official's job is taking possession of Jewish property. The boy goes with him to the estates. That is his identity for the rest of the war.

He calls it a strange, very strange life.

Asked decades later what the war taught him, he gives 4 words. Expect the unexpected.

Now September 1992, and the pound is pinned inside a European exchange system that the numbers no longer support.

Stan Druckenmiller is the one actually managing the fund. He says the conclusion was unavoidable under any intellectual thought process, and that his own reasoning would have taken him to 2 or 3 or 4 billion dollars.

It was Soros who pushed him, hard, to take it further. And Soros still wanted it larger.

They ran out of time before he got what he wanted.

Druckenmiller puts the whole philosophy in one sentence. It is not whether you are right or wrong. It is how much you have on when you are right.

The trade had been sitting there for 10 years. It paid once.

He spent the following months giving the money away, sometimes 100 million at a time, and he has always said he earns it in the west and spends it in the east.

He is not always right. He expected the crash to come in Japan, prepared for Japan, and it came on Wall Street instead. Estimates put that error at 650 million.

The lesson was never really about currencies. A lawyer handed it to a 14 year old in a city where the rules had stopped applying, and 48 years later the boy used it on an institution where everyone still assumed they held.

[ooaes @21xooaes]

https://t.co/IE4DRgPuYV

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A Stanford professor opens his quantum mechanics course by asking the room to raise hands by age. Almost nobody in it is under 40.

The camera never turns around. So for 18 years people have watched this course without ever seeing who he is talking to.

He explains it himself in the first 3 minutes, because physicists in Europe kept emailing him to ask what this actually was.

The man is Leonard Susskind, and the people in front of him are not students.

They came from Palo Alto, Mountain View, Foster City. One of them drove 20 miles. They pay a fee, the university lets them in, and a professor teaches them.

He counts the room out loud. Under 40, maybe 3 or 4 hands. Over 70, a good deal more, 10 or 12. Over 80, a couple.

Then he explains why the course moves the way it does.

They want the basic ideas fast. His words: they do not have a hell of a lot of time.

So he strips it. No warm up, no history of the field, no reassurance that it will get easier. He calls it the real McCoy and says plainly this is not freshman physics.

Then comes the choice that tells you he has taught this for decades.

He needs to show why quantum randomness is nothing like ordinary randomness. He could reach for Bell's inequalities. He refuses.

He picks the 2 slit experiment instead and says outright that it shows the strangeness in the least difficult way available to him.

That is the method underneath the whole course. When the room has no time to waste, you choose the demonstration with the shortest distance between confusion and understanding, not the one that sounds most serious.

It was recorded on 14 January 2008 and it is still free to anyone.

He asked about 90 as well. He says there have been people over 90 in that class.

They had less time left than anyone else in the building, and they spent it on the hardest subject there is.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/fJgVOFIBhG

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

Every image of a working brain you have ever seen is a compromise. You can see where activity happens but not when. Or when but not where. Never both at full resolution, and no technique available today fixes that.

This lecture is about that trade off, and about how much of what people claim to know about the brain is actually a claim about the instrument they used.

Her words, not mine.

And the way she handles it is why the hour is worth it.

She goes through the methods one at a time and, for each one, spends as much time on what it cannot see as on what it can. That order is unusual and it is the entire lesson.

Scanning shows blood flow, not thought, and blood arrives seconds after the event. Electrical recording from the scalp catches the timing perfectly and cannot tell you where in the tissue it came from. Damaged patients give you causal proof and arrive with damage nobody chose or controlled.

Every popular brain claim you have read came out of one of those tools, carrying that tool's blind spot along with it.

Then the part that stays with you. She shows that the same experiment can support two different conclusions depending on the method, and that choosing the method quietly chooses the answer.

That is not a scandal. It is the ordinary condition of the field, and almost nobody outside it knows.

Next time someone tells you what a brain scan proves, you will want to know which machine, and what that machine was blind to.

56 minutes. 3 methods. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

Aggression is not one thing. It is at least two, and they run on completely different machinery. The problem is that both come out looking identical from the outside, which is why almost everything people say about violence is built on a confusion.

This lecture opens the section where a Stanford professor spends four separate sessions on that confusion.

His words, not mine.

And the way he sets it up is why it holds for 96 minutes.

He starts by refusing the question everyone wants answered. Not whether humans are naturally violent. He says that question is unanswerable as stated, and then shows why every popular answer to it is smuggling in an assumption.

Instead he separates the cases. Violence that is a means to something. Violence that is the point in itself. Violence that is defensive and violence that is planned days ahead.

They look the same on camera. They come from different circuits, they respond to different hormones, and confusing them is how policy gets written badly.

Then he does something that sits with you. He points out that we are not against violence at all. Every society has categories of violence it rewards, categories it tolerates, and categories it punishes, and the biology cannot tell them apart. Only the context does.

The uncomfortable part is that the same act can move between those categories without changing in any measurable way.

He states it plainly and moves to the next slide.

Everyone thinks they oppose violence. What people actually oppose is violence in the wrong category, and almost nobody has looked at where they personally draw that line.

96 minutes. 2 kinds. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

@21xSilverhand This video is worth my attention i will save it.

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

The people who did the worst things in the last century were not monsters. They were ordinary, and that is the finding, not the excuse. Put an average person in a specific situation and the behaviour changes faster than the person does.

The man giving this lecture proved it on students, in a basement, and had to shut his own experiment down early because it was working too well.

His words, not mine.

And the way he handles it is why the hour holds.

He does not moralise. He treats cruelty as an output with inputs, and he lists them. Anonymity. Diffused responsibility. Permission arriving from above. Small steps, each one only slightly worse than the last.

That last one is the mechanism that matters. Nobody is ever asked to do the terrible thing first. They are asked to do something mildly wrong, and then the scale recalibrates around it.

He is also the man who served as an expert witness for a soldier at Abu Ghraib, which is why this is not theory for him. He went and looked at what a system produces when nobody is watching it.

Then the turn most people do not expect from this lecture. He spends the second half on the opposite question. If situations can manufacture cruelty in ordinary people, the same machinery should be able to manufacture the reverse.

He is not asking who resists. He is asking what conditions produce the person who resists, and whether you can build them deliberately.

The situation is doing more of the work than your character is. The only real question is whether you know which situation you are standing in.

59 minutes. 1 basement. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A Yale professor asked a lecture hall to prove that they are anything more than a body. Not to feel it. To prove it. Then he spent 41 minutes showing that the argument most people reach for first collapses the moment you state it carefully.

The question underneath is simpler than it sounds and worse than it sounds. What exactly is a person.

And the way he runs it is what makes the video worth watching.

He does not take a side and defend it. He builds both positions properly, as strongly as their best defenders would, and then attacks each one with the same energy. You are never told which one he holds until much later than you expect.

One side says you are a body plus something else. A soul, a mind, a thing that is not made of matter and can in principle survive without it.

The other says there is no extra ingredient. You are a body, running. Nothing has been left out of that description, and nothing needs adding.

Then the move that catches people. He asks what work the soul is actually doing in the explanation. Not whether it exists. What it explains that a body cannot. And he keeps narrowing the space until there is almost nothing left inside it.

He is not trying to insult anyone. He is trying to show you that the belief you have been carrying was never argued for. It was assumed, early, and never examined.

He sits on the desk in a t shirt and takes apart the question your entire culture is built on, calmly, in under an hour.

You already have an answer to this question. What you probably do not have is a reason.

41 minutes. 2 positions. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A Stanford professor stood in front of a lecture hall and told them that violence is not a moral failing. Then he spent 105 minutes taking it apart the way an engineer takes apart a machine, down to which structure fires first and which one arrives too late to stop it.

One claim sits underneath the whole thing. Cruelty and loyalty come off the same wiring. Same structures, same chemistry, same body.

The reason to give it 105 minutes is the method, not the subject.

Aggression never gets to stand on its own here. Other emotions keep arriving beside it, because the argument is that this one makes no sense without the rest, and the ones that arrive are not the ones you would have guessed.

A long section goes into what happens inside a brain in the seconds before a person turns violent. Not the childhood. Not the culture. The seconds. Hormones already circulating, a threshold already lowered, a decision effectively made before anyone experiences making it.

After that, the machinery in order. Which structure fires first. Which one is built to stop it. Why the one built to stop it shows up late, every time, in everyone.

Then comes the part people go back to. The identical event, in the identical body, producing viciousness in one setting and devotion in another. The difference is not moral. It is situational, and it is measurable.

It gets said flatly, with no drama at all, and then he moves on.

You come out of it unsettled rather than comforted. The biology excuses nothing. It takes away the story you had been telling yourself about why it happened.

Everyone has an explanation for the time they lost control. Almost nobody knows what was actually running while they did.

105 minutes. 1 threshold. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

A Stanford professor spent 100 minutes explaining schizophrenia, and he never once used the word crazy. He called it a disease of thought disorder. Then he said the emotions are not missing. They are attached to the wrong things.

The man is Robert Sapolsky, the neurobiologist who spent his career following wild baboons across Kenya to measure what stress does to a living body.

The way he builds it is what makes 100 minutes go fast.

He does not open with the illness. He is finishing a lecture on language, on how humans assemble meaning out of sound, and he lets that run. Then he walks straight from language into schizophrenia, and you realise the first half was the setup.

From there he refuses the easy answer twice. It is not just genetics. It is not just environment. He lays both out and shows you what happens where they meet, which is the only place the disease actually lives.

There is a section on how patients use language that is hard to shake afterwards. He shows what the thinking looks like from the inside, and it is not chaos. It is a system running on rules that are almost correct.

Under the video, noneya1987 wrote that this is one of those rare teachers who gets in the zone and just spits out knowledge in a completely digestible form. 3.3 thousand people agreed.

Recorded 26 May 2010. 6.5 million views. 8508 comments. One of 25 lectures in the Stanford course Human Behavioral Biology, and all of them are free.

Almost everyone uses this diagnosis as an insult without knowing a single thing about it. 100 minutes is the difference between having an opinion and knowing what you are talking about.

100 minutes. 2 causes. It is in the video.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

For twenty years a neuroscientist studied brain scans of murderers, hunting for the pattern that separates them from the rest of us. He found it. Then he found the same pattern at the bottom of a different stack, in a scan belonging to his own family, and when he broke the anonymity code it was his own brain.

His name is James Fallon. He teaches psychiatry and human behaviour at UC Irvine.

He assumed the machine was broken. It was not.

So he went to his family and started asking about the men on his father's side, and found a line of relatives accused of killing people.

He told his wife. She was not surprised. His daughter had already called him a narcissist. His family's response to the diagnosis was that it explained quite a lot.

What surprises you is the hour itself. He is funny. He tells the story of his own defect the way other people tell holiday anecdotes, and the room laughs with him the whole way through.

He has the brain. He has the ancestry. He never became violent, and his explanation for why is the argument the entire talk is built on.

He is also open about what he does do to people. It is not violence. It still costs them.

Read the comments afterwards. They are full of people catching themselves, an hour in, enjoying the company of a man who told them at the start that being enjoyable is one of his symptoms.

Nothing dangerous in a person ever announces itself. The wiring that makes someone hard to trust is the same wiring that makes them easy to like.

[Stefan. @paradeevic]

https://t.co/cVRnIwZGUy

[abovee 1% @21xExperience]

In October 1962 the President of the United States was secretly recording his own advisers. He never told them. Those recordings survive, and you can listen to the thirteen days when the world came closest to nuclear war, in the actual voices of the men deciding it.

Nobody in the room is performing for history. They do not know they are being taped.

What you hear is not a war cabinet. It is a group of men arguing, interrupting, going in circles, and being wrong in front of each other. The military pushes hard for strikes on Cuba. Kennedy keeps asking what happens on the second day, and the third, and nobody has an answer he likes.

The most frightening parts are the ordinary ones. Long silences. A president thinking out loud. A room full of the most powerful people alive discovering that every option available to them is bad.

We know how it ended. They did not. That gap is the whole experience of listening to it.

Twenty five minutes of tape from the closest call in human history, recorded by a man who thought he might need proof of what was said.

Almost nobody who makes a decision this size sounds certain while making it. That is worth knowing before you trust anyone who does.