Lipton, GLL, Making Primes More Random, here. Like the reduction of multiplication to the difference of squares trick.
Today I want to talk about mathematical tricks—not magic, not games, but small insights that are very useful. Tricks.
Choi and Yan, Vox, Information asymmetry raises the cost of capital for corporations, here. Should the government prevent tricks on the uninformed?
Governments around the world try to level the information playing field among investors by regulating the disclosure of corporate information. But what is the cost of unequal access to information? In this column, we review evidence from the three most recent papers in this area.
Martinuzzi and Dunbar, Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank Derivative Helped Monte Paschi Mask Losses, here. Who is really being tricked?
Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) designed a derivative for Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA at the height of the financial crisis that obscured losses at the world’s oldest lender before it sought a taxpayer bailout.
FPS Russia, RobotEx, here. Maybe the snipe already happened, but not from an Alpha Dog yet? I could have been late to this trick.
Im not sure If Ive ever shown you guys one of these before so…
Ritholtz, The Big Picture, Greatest Movie Comedies of All Time, here. Leaves Old Bedazzled off the list entirely. I smell a click count trick.
10. Duck Soup
9. South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Freed
8. Tootsie
7. The Princess Bride
6. Blazing Saddles
5. Some Like It Hot
4. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
3. The Lady Eve
2. Annie Hall
1. Monty Python & The Holy Grail
H. Allen Orr, The New York Review of Books, Awaiting a New Darwin, here. Bats are left out of the Singularity because we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is perhaps best known for his 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a modern classic in the philosophy of mind. In that paper, Nagel argued that reductionist, materialist accounts of the mind leave some things unexplained. And one of those things is what it would actually feel like to be, say, a bat, a creature that navigates its environment via the odd (to us) sense of echolocation. To Nagel, then, reductionist attempts to ground everything in matter fail partly for a reason that couldn’t be any nearer to us: subjective experience. While not denying that our conscious experiences have everything to do with brains, neurons, and matter, Nagel finds it hard to see how these experiences can be fully reduced with the conceptual tools of physical science.
Tyler Durden, Zerohedge, Taleb On “Skin in The Game” And His Disdain For Public Intellectuals, here. Yup, Public Intellectuals … don’t know how he tolerates them. Wait, …
Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about:
- why debt leads to fragility (5:16);
- the importance of “skin in the game” to a properly functioning financial system (10:45);
- why large banks should be nationalized (21:47);
- why technology won’t rule the future (24:20);
- the value of studying the classics (26:09);
- his intellectual adversaries (33:30);
- why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50);
- his intellectual influences (39:10);
- why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10);
- why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50);
- his libertarianism (47:30);
- and why he’ll never take writing advice from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies” (51:49)
Matthew Klein of The Economist has a great post up about the history of modern macro, drawing on a presentation by the incomparable Markus Brunnermeier. If you are at all interested in macroeconomics, you should check it out (though of course econ profs and many grad students will know the bulk of it already).
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