" we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell."
Salma Hayek on Harvey Weinstein, here
On speaking out
da objectificação
"There is a deep sadness when I witness a man that can’t recognize the emptiness he feels when he objectifies himself as a bank and truly believes he can buy love with things and status. It is painful to witness the betrayal when a woman takes him up on that offer."
Jada Pinkett-Smith: “The War on Men Through the Degradation of Women”
Aqui.
On Takatoshi Kato's predictions / suit-and-tie-wearing hotshots
"These were days before I decided to climb up the mountain, speak slowly and in a priestly tone, and try shaming people rather than insulting them. Listening to Kato's presentation, I could not control myself and flew into a rage in front of two thousand Koreans – I was so angry that I almost started shouting in French, forgetting that I was in Korea. I ran to the podium and told the audience that the next time someone in a suit and tie gave them projections for some dates in the future, they should ask him to show what he had projected in the past – in this case, what he had been forecasting for 2008 and 2009 (the crisis years) two to five years earlier, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007. They would then verify that highly Venerable Kato-san and his colleagues are, to put it mildly, not very good at this predictionizing business. And it is not just Mr. Kato: our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not so close to zero; it is zero."
"What was getting me in that state of anger was my realization that forecasting was not neutral. It is all in the iatrogenics. Forecasting can be downright injurious to risk-takers – no different from giving people snake oil medicine in place of cancer treatment, or bleeding, as in the story of Geaorge Washington. And there was evidence. Danny Kahneman – rightfully – kept admonishing me for my fits of anger and outbursts at respectable members of the establishment (respectable for now), deeming such behavior to be unbecoming of the wise member of the intelligentsia I was supposed to be. Yet he stoked my frustration and sense of outrage the most by showing me the evidence of iatrogenics. There are ample empirical findings to the effect that providing someone with a random numerical forecast increases his risk taking, even if the person knows the projections are random.
All I hear is complaints about forecasters, when the next step is obvious yet rarely taken: avoidance of iatrogenics from forecasting. We understand childproofing, but not forecaster-hubris-proofing."
The financier Warren Buffett states that he tries to invest in businesses that are "so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Quando a incompetência ajuda
"The famine in China that killed 30 million people between 1959 and 1961 can enlighten us about the effect of the state "trying hard." Xin Meng, Nancy Qian, and Pierre Yared examined its variations between areas, looking into how the famine was distributed. They discovered that famine was more severe in areas with higher food production in the period before the famine began, meaning that it was government policy of food distribution that was behind much of the problem, owing to the inflexibility in the procurement system. And indeed, a larger than expected share of famine over the past century has occured in economies with central planning.
But often it is the state's incompetence that can help save us from the grip of statism and modernity – inverse iatrogenics. The insightful author Dmitri Orlov showed how calamities were avoided after the breakdown of the Soviet state because food production was inefficient and full of unintentional redundancies, which ended up working in favor of stability. Stalin played with agriculture, causing his share of famine. But he and his successors never managed to get agriculture to become "efficient," that is, centralized and optimized as it is today in America, so every town had the staples growing around it. This was costlier, as they did not get benefits of specialization, but this local lack of specialization allowed people to have access to all varieties of food in spite of the severe breakdown of institutions. In the United States, we burn twelve calories in transportation for every calorie of nutrition; in Soviet Russia, it was one to one. One can imagine what could happen to the United States (or Europe) in the event of food disruptions. Further, because of the inefficiency of housing in the Soviet state, people had been living in close quarters for three generations, and had tight bonds that ensured – as in the Lebanese war – that they stayed close to each other and lent to each other. People had real links, unlike in social networks, and fed their hungry friends, expecting that some friend (most likely another one) would help them should they get in dire circumstances.
And the top-down state is not necessarily the one that has the reputation of being so."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Avoiding black swans and becoming more antifragile
"Knowledge has not improved massively. We do not have advanced knowledge. read Seneca and you'll see that in world sciences and in a lot of fields we have not advanced that much. In the complex domain we have not advanced that much. So, being a generalist as people were 500 years ago, is still feasible." [NT]
"Why is it, that we humans denigrate the systems ability to correct themselves on their own? We act as if we were necessary for things to take place. And that's a big problem. We always tend to think that we're smarter than Nature. We have that bias. So this is the problem I'm working on. Is how to mitigate that. How to replace the instinct with something that's not as harmful." [NT]
In praise of procrastinantion
"The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition – or a bonus – for it. [...]
A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve their objectives, but rather to accommodate the fact that these objectives are moving targets. Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. And of course members did change their minds after seeing the failures and horrors of Stalinism and similar regimes.
There is a latin expression festina lente, "make haste slowly." The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, "passive achievement."
Nassim Taleb, in "Antifragile"
The importance of developing skills
"The first thing about developing skills for ordinary craftworkers – people who work in what we don't think of as the elite sort of jobs, people who do everyday kinds of, both manual and service work – is that getting a skill in the craft is slow and long. One measure of the time it takes to become skilled in the practice of a craft is what's called 'The ten thousand hour rule'. And this rough number (but a good one) translates into practicing, for instance, three or four hours a day, for five to seven years. The time that's needed to gain mastery whether one is learning piano technique, glass blowing, sport or surgery."
Richard Sennet
"Best-practice is a form of 'de-skilling'"
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"Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.
The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things." Aqui
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Political annealing e o Princípio de Peter
"It has been hard to explain to real people that stressors and uncertainty have their role in life — so you can imagine what it would be like to explain it to politicians. Yet this is where a certain amount of randomness is needed the most.
I was once shown the script of a film based on a parable of a city completely ruled by randomness — very Borgesian. At set intervals, the ruler randomly assigns to the denizens a new role in the city. Say the butcher would become a baker, and the baker a prisoner, etc. At the end, people end up rebelling against the ruler, asking for stability as their inalienable right.
I immediately thought that perhaps the opposite parable should be written: instead of having the rulers randomize the jobs of citizens, we should have citizens randomize the jobs of rulers, naming them by raffles and removing them at random as well. That is similar to simulated annealing — and it happens to be no less effective. It turned out that the ancients — again, those ancients! — were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parlementary system."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Entrevista a Philippe Starck
Comprou uma propriedade perto de Grândola. Chamou-lhe Figueira Feliz. O que pretende fazer lá?
Vou pela primeira vez na vida fazer uma casa que não é uma casa moderna. Sempre construí casas de vanguarda, mas quando cheguei às planícies de Grândola, encontrei de tal forma um local de harmonia absoluta — as proporções, a luz, a temperatura, a vibração... — que percebi que não podia fazer nada que não saísse naturalmente do solo. Quero construir uma quinta com arquitetura alentejana. É a primeira vez que o faço, não sei o que pensar. Será que estou a ficar velho? Vou fazer vinho evidentemente biodinâmico, biológico, não filtrado e sem sulfito, o vinho perfeito. E vou fazer também azeite com uma empresa que tenho em Espanha. De resto, não sei. Vou inventar, vou ver.
Aqui
The most British Japanese, or shall I say, the most Japanese British
"Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished. [...] Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth."
Kazuo Ishiguro, in The Remains of the Day
Memórias de território
O corpo, um território com memórias (cicatrizes), histórias...
E a distância óptima será definida pelas histórias que ele encerra (o corpo).
Arrisco dizer...
Shifting the paradigm, changing the mindset
Video: entrevista com George Cooper, 'Economics is a broken science': Dr George Cooper on his new book Money, Blood and Revolution.
"In a series of disarmingly simple arguments financial market analyst George Cooper challenges the core principles of today's economic orthodoxy and explains how we have created an economy that is inherently unstable and crisis prone. With great skill, he examines the very foundations of today's economic philosophy and adds a compelling analysis of the forces behind economic crisis. His goal is nothing less than preventing the seemingly endless procession of damaging boom-bust cycles, unsustainable economic bubbles, crippling credit crunches, and debilitating inflation. His direct, conscientious, and honest approach will captivate any reader and is an invaluable aid in understanding today's economy."
RIP Hugh Hefner
A revista Playboy, não serviu apenas para alimentar os sonhos [legítimos] mais 'selvagens' [wild] do género masculino da época.
Não vou, obviamente, referir-me a Hugh Hefner à luz da mais comum e divulgada perspectiva machista e reforçadora dos valores do patriarcado, que tem corrido nas redes sociais desde a notícia da sua morte, pois essa perspectiva é redutora e desrespeitadora no que toca a mulheres e homens e, portanto, não posso nem a quero subscrever, mesmo que seja capaz de me rir de todas as anedotas e notícias e comentários 'divertidos' que por aqui proliferam.
A acção de Hugh Hefner [também] teve um impacto positivo na cultura ocidental, na medida em que ajudou a dar voz a questões ligadas aos direitos de minorias e contribuiu para que questões ligadas `sexualidade e à emancipação das mulheres pudessem ser debatidas abertamente.
da relevância da liberdade
A sentence that still shocks me when I think about it [civil war in Lebanon] was voiced by one of my grandfather's friends, a wealthy Aleppine merchant who fled the Baath regime. When my grandfather asked his friend during the Lebanese war why he did not go back to Aleppo, his answer was categorical: "We people of Aleppo prefer war to prison." I thought that he meant that they were going to put him in jail, but then I realized that by "prison" he meant the loss of political and economic freedoms.
Economic life, too, seems to prefer war to prison. Lebanon and Northern Syria had very similar wealth per individual (what economists call gross Domestic Product) about a century ago – and had identical cultures, language, ethnicities, food, and even jokes. Everything was the same except for the rule of the "modernizing" Baath Party in Syria compared to the totally benign state in Lebanon. In spite of a civil war that decimated the population, causing an acute brain drain and setting wealth back by several decades, in addition to every possible form of chaos that rocked the place, today Lebanon has considerably higher standard of living – between three and six times the wealth of Syria.
Nor did the point escape Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: "It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues... A little bit of agitation gives resources to souls and what makes the species prosper isn't peace, but freedom.
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
Antifragile
"Consider this in terms of economic and institutional life. If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever. Nor would it have permanent administrations and forecasting departments that try to outsmart the future – it would not let the scam artists of the United States Office of Management and Budget make such mistakes of epistemic arrogance.
If one looks at history as a complex system similar to nature, then, like nature, it won't let a single empire dominate the planet forever – even if every superpower from the Babylonians to the Egyptians to the Persians to the Romans to modern America has believed in permanence of its domination and managed to produce historians to theorize to that effect. Systems subjected to randomness – and unpredictability – build a mechanism beyond the robust to opportunistically reinvent themselves each generation, with continuous change of population and species.
[...] Let us look at how evolution benefits from randomness and volatility (in some dose, of course). The more noise and disturbances in the system, up to a point, barring those extreme shocks that lead to extinction of a species, the more effect of reproduction of the fittest and that of random mutations will play a role in defining the properties of the next generation. Say an organism produces ten offspring. If the environment is perfectly stable, all ten will be able to reproduce. But if there is instability, pushing aside five of these descendants (likely to be on average weaker than their surviving siblings), then those that evolution considers (on balance) tha better ones will reproduce, making the gene undergo some fitness. Likewise, if there is variability among the offspring, thanks to occasional random spontaneous mutation, a sort of copying mistake in the genetic code, then the best should reproduce, increasing the fitness of the species. So evolution benefits from randomness by two different routes: randomness in the mutations, and randomness in the environment – both act in a similar way to cause changes in the traits of the surviving next generations."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile
