10 Monday AM Reads

June 22, 2015 7:45am by

Welcome to Summer. Start it off right with our low-humidity, morning train reads:

• Surprise: Some Active Managers are Skilled. (Alpha Architect) but see When Ordinary Beats Extraordinary (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Housel: Probability Beats Predictions (Fool)
• McCulley: Escape Fandango​ (Pimco)
• The housing market, any way you look at it, can’t lose (Marketwatch) see also After an Era of Ups and Downs, Home Prices Return to Sanity (The Upshot)
• Twitter’s Project Lightning will curate the news around live events (Fortune)

Continues here

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  1. rd commented on Jun 22

    Re: Probability beat predictions

    What I have seen over the years is that many people become paralyzed at decision making unless they believe there is a certain outcome. They struggle with the concept of making a decision based on probability while using the other side of the probability outcome to make adaptable back-up plans. The same people often fret over past decisions that did not work out as expected, which paralyzes their future decision making even more.

    If you can accept Yogi Berra’s dictum of “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”, then decisions become faster (not necessarily easier) because you are already looking for evidence to indicate where the course after the decision should be followed as a straight line or shifted to a different path as more information is gathered.

    I have watched too many people pass opportunities by over the years simply because they were afraid to make a decision. What they did not realize is that the passive act of not making a decision is actually an active decision in its own right. You need to be sure that the decision can be postponed or not made at all without creating bigger negative consequence than come from actually making a decision making a decision. In many cases, inaction is more destructive than a decision that does not work out well but has a back-up plan.

    • intlacct commented on Jun 23

      “What I have seen over the years is that many people become paralyzed at decision making unless they believe there is a certain outcome. They struggle with the concept of making a decision based on probability while using the other side of the probability outcome to make adaptable back-up plans. The same people often fret over past decisions that did not work out as expected, which paralyzes their future decision making even more.”

      Reminds me of the central characters in ‘The End of the Road’ by Barth (sinistrality! – choose the one on the left) and ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Pirsig.

  3. rd commented on Jun 22

    A lot of economists have been wondering about why productivity has been lagging in this Information Age. Here is an example of something that you would think would be made more efficient by the Information Age, but hasn’t. Internal corporate bureaucratic processes do not necessarily improve with advances in computer technology. Both Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle are still alive and well.

    http://www.marketwatch.com/story/job-interview-process-takes-10-days-longer-than-it-did-five-years-ago-2015-06-22

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