Random stuff that I care about
Some of the things we do, produce right skewed distributions. In certain cases we want to be on the left side of the right skewed distribution, and in different ones we want to be on its right side. Left side Examples here are the time needed in sports like running a marathon, or the time [ ]
Generations ago, you were starting work at your early teens and working until almost the end. As technology advances, people can now start working later (school, studies), retire earlier (pension), receive benefits, or build enough assets and stop working. It seems we have various dials (political, cultural) to keep or enforce a relative balance of [ ]
These arguments are based on the sunken cost fallacy. There are mores. I find that they are coming from a good place but they are oversimplifications that may lead to wrong conclusions if taken at face value. In conclusion, the sunken cost fallacy makes sense in some closed systems, but sometimes the systems may (have [ ]
Alice starts with 1 million and has no income. Bob has no starting money but a salary of 30k. We examine three scenarios, starting from the simplest. Simplest Assuming no externalities (taxes, investments, expenses), Bob needs about 33 years to reach the money that Alice has. Investment Assume an investment with a return of 3% [ ]
A common financial trick is to have a bunch of uncorrelated assets that you balance over time. Assume you have access to assets A and B, with about similar returns. You can have a portfolio of 50% A and 50% B. If A gets overweight, because for instance it went up a lot in price, [ ]
Rare events are more frequent than what a normal distribution predicts. Andrew Lo, professor in MIT, showed evidence against the popular Random Walk hypothesis. The idea was that if we have some variance V_w in a week, we should have V_m = 4 * V_w in a month. This was not true. He published his [ ]
There are things we do as kids, that we stop as we grow up. May be because priorities are shifting, obligations pile up, our environment is changing or something else. Recently, I learnt that Age of Mythology had a new version. One of my favorite late childhood games was available again. I used to like [ ]
Buy enough pairs for two weeks of the same socks. Make sure you can buy the same ones from time to time, once some of the socks need replacements. Enjoy the benefits: You can still keep 1-2 special pairs of socks. I understand this advice is not applicable to everyone, but if it is applicable [ ]
To get an idea of the upcoming changes due to AI, and the automation/delegation of knowledge work, we can look at what happened after the automation/delegation of manual labor for many people and at least in big part. This change happened in much slower pace than what is projected of AI. Admittedly, there were also [ ]
Multiple people on the field expect AGI within the next 5 10 years. How will that affect our lives? It feels like it is worth pausing for a moment and wondering. This is speculative. I only hope it will make some readers annoyed enough to form their own thoughts. AGI won t be selfish. Simply [ ]