Rafic Daud

🎾⚽️♟🚴🏽‍♂️ | 📍Lisbon

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The Lindy technical paper is out, with comments on aging and immortality.

[0xDipper @Dipper_pol]

Daniel Kahneman: the day Saddam Hussein was captured, the same news "explained" both the bond market going up and going down.

Treasuries rose - Bloomberg's headline said the capture made the world safer. Half an hour later treasuries fell -the new headline said the capture boosted appetite for risk.

Same event, opposite stories. The market moved first; the pundits reverse-engineered a reason. That, he says, is how financial commentary actually works.

"Our confidence comes from the coherence of the story - not the evidence behind it."

"The conclusion comes first. Then we believe the arguments that support it."

"System 1 is largely indifferent to the quality and amount of evidence."

~55 min, free. why the market's "explanations" are stories told after the fact ↓

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Nice illustration of Jensen's inequality: the average km-h is not the inverse of the average hours per km.

[Tiho Brkan @TihoBrkan]

Differentiating skill and luck, and sidestepping the dreaded outcome bias, is an extremely diffcult task in a highly complex domain like investing.

Academia argues that to prove genuine skill over a lucky streak, a fund manager generating a modest 2% excess return (or alpha) annually would need 36 years of data to reach statistical significance.

In plain English, we could be highly confident that their success isn't simply due to chance or luck.

If that manager's alpha drops to just 1%, the required timeframe spikes to over 140 years. And for a manager delivering a decently attractive 4% of alpha per year? To reach statistical significance, you'd need a solid decade.

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

ChatGPT psychosis is rare if you know how it works.

“How GPT works” should be a required subject.

Primary lesson: a GPT is a function of its data. It can uncover interesting facts and make fascinating correlations. But it will not discover non-governmental demons.

Anything the GPT says is a remix of its training corpus.

But labs benefit from GPT mysticism so they don’t say this.

If you internalize the lesson, esoteric responses, when you invariably hit them, will at most make you think “hmm I wonder where it got that from.” And maybe you search or prompt a bit more to find out.

Otherwise you’ll think you are revealing some deep universal truth, and that’s when things go down hill.

Teach your kids that a GPT is a function of its data.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

The UAE will gain 9,800 millionaires in 2025 — the most globally. Meanwhile, the UK is expected to lose 16,500...taking $91B in capital with them. This was entirely predictable.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

To make it pedagogical, LLM is an autocomplete function that randomizes based on the statistical frequency:
+ Probability matching: if in the frequency space, the autocomplete is at 85% "take an umbrella" and 1/10^6 "have squid ink", it will do 85% of the time "take an umbrella".
+ "Temperature" setting: you can pick up to 100% the highest probability: "take an umbrella".

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

A major new review from Yale (Moen, Baker, Iwasaki, 2025) offers the most comprehensive picture yet of what SARS-CoV-2 does to the nervous system.
The conclusion is stark:
Long COVID is a chronic neuroimmune disorder affecting brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves.🧵

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Noam Chomsky on faking democracy

[Mark Manson @Markmanson]

Beware: learning more is a smart person’s favorite form of procrastination.

[Dividend Growth Investor @DividendGrowth]

I often think about this comment

[StripMallGuy @realEstateTrent]

I think people who buy based on a cap rate are mostly just making a macro bet on interest rates.

I don’t think you’re ready to buy real estate unless you can spot a good deal within minutes.

I don’t think you can be the expert at more than one niche.

I think people who sell real estate courses don’t make enough money in real estate and therefore can’t be that great at it.

I think the hold-forever mentality made sense when rates were dropping for 40 years.

I think you should study your potential upside, but obsess about your potential downside.

I don’t think any great real estate investor thinks it’s easy.

I think most people are better off paying the tax and patiently waiting for the next great deal than panic-buying to complete their 1031 exchange.

I don’t think buying great deals scales.

I think smaller deals are great for LPs; huge deals are great for GPs.

I think the biggest difference between an amateur buyer and a professional buyer is the amateur focuses on the cap rate, and the professional focuses on the price per foot.

I don’t think you should invest with anyone unless you have a clear understanding of what their fee structure is incentivizing.

I think the vast majority of off-market deals are severely overpriced.

I think there’s an entire generation of investors who only know how to make money by relying on cap rate compression.

I think if you’ve reached the ‘best and final’ round, you’ve gone too far.

I think ground-up development has a terrible risk/reward ratio.

I don’t think amateur buyers realize that appraisals aren’t taken seriously by experienced investors.

I think the term “passive income” is a genius sales tactic geared towards the unsuspecting.

And I think the cold call is by far the most effective way to consistently find great deals.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Something I explained to 13 yo: There is no intrinsically fair price for any commodity, just the market price. Most people have no problem understanding that. Until the commodity is labor. Then suddenly it becomes hard to understand.

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Now that the S&P is back to flat YTD, great time to bring back this classic reminder about markets

[StripMallGuy @realEstateTrent]

The mom-and-pop retail tenants you want aren't the ones who are super excited about the day they're going to open for business.

The real operators know that the enthusiasm of those first few weeks will fade.

I want the tenant who understands it's a long marathon, and who's excited about years 3, and 5, 11, and beyond.

I want the operator that knows it's going to be a total grind to get the business off the ground, with lots of ups and downs and surprises -- and sets up their business to persevere and succeed for the long term.

Just like in sports -- anybody's going to be excited for the first game of the season. But only the very best prepare for what is way ahead.

They prepare for the 5th month of the season -- when the team's tired, there are injuries, and you have to keep showing up just like you did for Opening Day.

Pick the restaurant that's excited for year 7, and acts accordingly -- and you'll win as a retail landlord.

[Rafic Daud @raficdaud]

@angryhacademic This was on my differential a couple of years ago as a prominent neurologist was 100 sure it was the case. Also very common post covid…

[William Rand @rand_rand17]

There is a an increasing amount of evidence showing Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) reactivation in Long Covid. In this paper the team show that EBV blocks the vitamin D receptor in B cells & therefore blocks its effects on the target genes. https://t.co/vO2AKCxk1x

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

LinkedIn cringe tier list

> "happy to announce" post for every new job
> listed as HBS alum after doing 1 week program at HBS
> Having MBA or CFA at the end of your name
> "Incoming Investment Banking Analyst"
> 800 word thank you post tagging an entire village

What else?

[Dr. Brandon Beaber @Brandon_Beaber]

High efficacy disease modifying therapy for ms did not clearly reduce progression compared to lower efficacy drugs. Dr. Jessica ye. #AANAM