My beliefs are not set in stone. I’m happy if someone challenges them, preferably, with evidence!
A lot of real value is not correctly priced.
- Open source software is really impactful, but not well compensated. Book authors keep me intellectually stimulated with almost no compensation.
- While owning expensive cars makes me not even a little bit happy.
- The best learning materials either available for free or cost a fraction of a fancy university (even in Europe, where they’re cheap).
- There are tons of personal arbitrage opportunities, if you know yourself well, and can avoid the things that people usually want.
We underestimate unknown unknowns by a large extent.
- It’s really hard / or impossible to think of them.
Markets are really useful, but have their limits. If left uncontrolled for a long time, they bring in harmful societal distortions.
Markets are often wrong, and stay in that state for a sustained period.
Creativity is search, and can be replicated with brute force algorithms. Although it’s highly ineffective to do so.
Most opportunity lies where the quantitative approach can’t reach.
There are is opportunity in applying the quantitative approach to new, undiscovered domains.
Contradicting the above two: the world is non-stationary, and you have to be extremely careful relying solely on models.
- Models work well with human supervision: choosing which model to rely on at a time, and recognizing when none of them are applicable is immensely useful.
Software can be both a the perfect depiction of the best and the worst of human’s ability to think in/create systems, thanks to its malleability.
Recognizing when a dogma is useful and when it’s not is one of the most important skills in decision making / engineering / science.
- Dogma is sometimes disguised as a “fact” - and challenging a fact is easier said than done. It requires conscious effort, and it’s not that rewarding 99% of the time.
- I think there should be courses about it - maybe there are? Critical thinking comes to my mind, but that’s focussed on science.