Liberty

Building a strawman are ye? I'm actually really sympathetic to the argument for gold, and think there's a very high chance that it will "work", probably partly because enough people believe that it will work. It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy because of that critical mass. I'm just not sure if it's the best use of my capital. Now that's going off the deep end. Blind faith in gold is one thing, but the price of gold is entirely set by human actions. The nature of reality and the universe isn't like that. If you have blind faith in something and it works, it doesn't mean that everything you have blind faith in will work too. That's logic 101. Back to the strawman: I dislike how you seem to put words in my mouth and ascribe financial beliefs to me. You have no idea what my opinions are about monetary policy, governments, or whether I can think outside the box of whatever. Speak for yourself, and I'll speak for myself.

Ha! Honestly, I'm really attracted by gold, and even more by silver (which has more industrial uses). But that attraction is partly irrational, as I can't really give myself an argument in favor of buying some that is tight enough to allow me to do it. I really wish I could better value precious metals (though cash cost of production + exploration might be a good start, but what about on the demand side?)... I don't know. I'm still learning about them. Anyway, I still prefer productive businesses :)

As long as you agree that you can't disprove that there's an invisible dragon in my garage, fairies at the bottom of my garden, a magical teapot orbiting saturn, and that Thor actually runs the universe, and that technically you have to be agnostic about all those things because they can't be disproved. Oh, and that you can never ever prove that anything doesn't exist (can't prove a negative), so that assertion has no value and doesn't make a "not disproved" thing more likely to exist. Oh, and lastly, I wouldn't agree that physicists/scientists have done "nothing to dispute that". Many of the arguments used by religious people in the past have changed over time because science has shown that they weren't correct. That's certainly disputing something, and it does show how those who claim to have the truth can actually be pretty flexible in what they use to justify their beliefs. I don't understand what you mean. Please elaborate on the link between explaining my reasoning on this topic and naïveté. Thanks.

Well, I definitely need to lighten up and leave this thread and go back to listening to conference calls that's for sure! I'm not even on the West coast so it's quite late here :D Cheers Parsad.

I'm 30. Is this an attempt to pull rank on me or something? An appeal to authority or some other logical fallacy that has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of my reasoning? A way to put me in the "young" bucket so you can more easily dismiss anything I say? Not that it matters; if I happened to be 50, you'd probably find some other way... Next you'll say: "Oh, I was just like you when I was your age, but I grew out of it..." *sigh* Indeed, I did not fully comprehend what you meant in your first paragraph because it wasn't clearly stated. But now with this elaboration which clarifies your meaning, I can say: Not knowing why there is something instead of nothing or how it happened or why (if there's a why - some things just happen without any entity that has a reason for them) just tells you that you don't know. It's not a license to fill that blank with anything pulled out of thin air anymore than not knowing how the sun worked was a license to call it a god. Fact is that all the evidence that we have access to is part of the observable universe, limited by the speed of light, and that anything inside that system probably can't tell you about whatever happened before the big bang. But there doesn't have to be something 'before' the big bang. Our intuitive grasp of time comes from our evolved past. Reality can be a lot more counter-intuitive than that. It is possible that the big bang was the beginning of time, or that it is one of many universes running in cycles, or that there's a meta-verse, or whatever.. Not knowing which of these or other possible hypotheses is the correct one doesn't mean there's a god behind it all, it means that we don't know. When we find evidence for a god, then that'll be something else entirely. It also doesn't mean that there needs to be a reason or a plan behind how things happen. Why is gravity what it is? How about it just is. Questions about the origins of our universe are fascinating. But I don't like when mysteries are used to justify stuff for which there's no evidence (a compounding of mysteries).

Age doesn't change facts, being old or young doesn't have anything to do with it. But being older and having grown up during a time in which it was more common to indoctrinate children before they were old enough to think critically probably has something to do with more older people believing certain things... Go ahead and tell Hawkings and all the other physicists that they don't know what they're doing... Next you can tell Andrew Wiles that his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was flawed :o Our brains haven't evolved to intuitively grasp thinks like quantum mechanics or general relativity, and that's why they seem so weird and nonsensical to us (same reason why we can't think in 7 dimensions or about objects moving at relativistic speeds or whatever). But the math provides predictions that are testable with instruments and experiments, and at very very very very high levels of precision. This isn't just made up sh*t, we know a lot about how the universe works even if it doesn't make sense to you.

I've heard a different saying: The best antidote to christianity is actually reading the bible. ;) Really? Please elaborate on this, because that's an interesting claim about science as much as it is about religion. What do you see there that "almost perfectly parallels the modern scientific view of cosmological and earthly evolution" except in the broadest sense and most ex post facto fitting of the data? Do you see anything that convincingly couldn't have been written by people from that era? If it's such a good parallel, why doesn't evolutionary and cosmological science have roots in biblical texts (I mean, if it's all really "almost perfectly" there, seems like a good starting point to create testable hypotheses, no?) rather than having had to fight off untruths from the bible (heliocentrism, flat earth, young earth, living things being designed as finished entities, humans being separate from the animal kingdom, supernatural forces controlling everyday events, etc), and why have christians of all kinds fought evolution by natural selection so hard for so long (and still do in many cases)? Are you sure you're not just rationalizing and cherry picking to make the data fit your new beliefs rather than looking at the evidence to figure out what it leads to? I think many people don't feel they can fight the mountain of evidence that science provides but they viscerally don't want to stop believing whatever they believe, so they kind of hand-wave it all away by saying "oh well, it all fits with the bible anyway". But saying that doesn't make it so; it's a testable claim, and looking at the bible and comparing it with the science shows it doesn't gel except if you really torture the meaning of things (in the way that reading too much into stuff does; not in the way it would read if someone who actually knew the facts would have transmitted the information). If the bible and the oral tradition of christianity didn't exist, could we just look at the world and figure out 'christian truths' about the origin of the universe and life based on observation? If not, why isn't there evidence of all those things while we're findings lots of evidence for lots of other alternative explanations? If you had read the bible without having learned about modern science, would you have come out thinking things that are compatible with scientific findings? Why try to graft the supernatural onto modern scientific theories (evolution, cosmology) that were devised entirely without finding any evidence of the supernatural, theories that work just fine without postulating these magical occurrences (ie. occam's razor)? Isn't that like saying that computer CPUs also run on a kind of magic that we just can't find evidence for? I mean, how likely is it that a world that is anything like what the bible describes would be so devoid of any evidence for those things that some people are still looking for even the smallest thing to hang onto hundreds of years later, without even speaking of the big things that could be incontrovertible evidence for all to see if they were present? If you don't take the bible literally, how do you decide what should be taken literally, what shouldn't, and how to interpret what shouldn't? And if reality doesn't allow for every person to have their own personal truth, how come most christians seem to be interpreting things differently, and how do you know your interpretation is close to the truth? How do you decide which parts to follow and which parts to drop (all the childish tantrums thrown by god, mostly out of petty jealousy; the genocides, infanticides, and honor rapes of daughters and slavery and such -- I'm assuming you don't base your life on those, but why not?)? Why are those bad parts in there do you think? Doesn't fallibility in some places show that the rest can be false too? How do you know it's right to not believe in most of the gods and religious teachings that people have ever believed in (thor, vishnu, apollo, etc.. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gods ) but that the christian god isn't like that? Why not go all the way and be atheistic about one more :) I'm sorry, but everytime someone says how scientific and coherent with modern theories the bible is, it just raises all those questions to which I never saw good answers...

Very interesting video, thanks for posting. I sure hope that job pays well! :P

I don't think it matters too much in the end, as it's not like religious folks can't be arrogant too. All humans can be, and saying "the sky is blue" with an arrogant tone doesn't make the sky green. What matters in the end is the correctness of the reasoning and the evidence on which it is based, and so far I don't find any religious arguments for the supernatural convincing, whether they are delivered humbly or arrogantly. That's the bottom line for me. But as we're moving away from evolutionary biology and such, I'm losing interest and I feel others probably are too, so I'll try to only post if there's something I feel could interest people more widely.

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence. So, you believe in value investing, although evidence is clearly against it? Most academics largely dismiss value investing, even saying that Buffett's streak was luck. Also, let's say you had a personal story like I discussed. Would that change anything? Are you comparing investing, which is mostly a social construct based on man-made institutions, to the laws of physics? I'm sorry but I can't follow you there (and I also disagree that evidence is against value investing -- there's a difference between what most people believe and what the evidence is -- even when most people thought the earth was flat the evidence was that it was an oblate spheroid, and even if most people believe in EMT, the evidence is that markets aren't completely efficient).

For people who like to follow Musk, here's another great interview (more about Tesla than SpaceX): http://www.autoblog.com/2012/09/07/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-q-and-a/

That's interesting, I hadn't heard that one before. Thanks for sharing :)

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence.

You just made me think of two pics which I had to Google: https://images.nonexiste.net/popular/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The-few-seconds-of-silence-that-followed-felt-so-good-.png http://i.imgur.com/caWYC.jpg As well as a book by Dawkins called Unweaving the Rainbow where he talks about, among other things, how it isn't true that science makes the universe less wonderful and amazing by revealing its secrets, but that it is religion's mysteries and revelations that are small and uninteresting - basically what a bronze age civilization could come up with - compared to the great questions and discoveries of science about the nature and composition of the universe and how things in it actually work. I also like this sequence of posts on Less Wrong. Here's an excerpt: "If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. [...] I have already remarked that nothing is inherently mysterious—nothing that actually exists, that is. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven't visited yet, etc. etc... Which is to say that everything—everything that actually exists—is liable to end up in "the dull catalogue of common things", sooner or later. Your choice is either: Decide that things are allowed to be unmagical, knowable, scientifically explicable, in a word, real, and yet still worth caring about; Or go about the rest of your life suffering from existential ennui that is unresolvable." http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Joy_in_the_Merely_Real Slightly related: :)

I wonder how much that is in purchasing power after adjusting for inflation. Anyone has an easy way to do the math? Still sounds like a good deal, but probably a bit less impressive :)

So for you if the eye can't "just happen" by accident, it's much easier for you to believe that it's creator "just happened"? The Deity seems more complex than the eye. Me, I favor the less complex of the two as more likely to happen by accident. Occam's razor is definitely warranted here, but it's not even necessary since natural selection DOESN'T say that things happen just by accident. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The only thing that is random are the mutations. The selection of those mutations isn't random at all, it is the 'fittest' individuals that are selected in the gene pool by having more offspring than the less fit individuals. In the same way, organs like the eye evolved gradually by conferring advantages and thus extra fitness. They were passed on to offspring giving benefits, and some offspring then had slightly better eyes which were then passed on and so on. Rinse and repeat a few million years. So the first eyes were very simple and had limited capabilities, and they progressively got better and more complex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye It's truly a fascinating topic, and not a mystery at all. But to show how the eye evolved and wasn't designed, you only have to look at the optical nerve. It's backwards! That's why we have a blind spot. Our eyes would be much better if the nerves were in the back rather than in front of the retina, but it happened that way first and evolution can't always backtrack after errors like that, and since it still works well enough, no real need. Same thing for how one of man's two testicles has a cord that goes all the way around some organs in the abdomen while the other is much shorter; an error that wasn't too bad for fitness and thus was left there, but definitely not a sign of design (unless you have one hell of an incompetent designer). Another example is how human women have such trouble with childbirth compared to most other mammals. It's because over time we evolved to walk upright, and there's a tradeoff there in pelvis size. Narrower is better to walk, but wider is better for childbirth. So basically, human brain size at birth has been limited by what can fit through a woman's pelvis at birth, and it's still just barely what fits without killing too many women (without modern medical help, a lot more would die in childbirth than do now) for the tradeoff to become an evolutive disadvantage. In any case, it is certainly more plausible to me to say that complex things such as eyes and humans have simple origins and have gradually, incrementally become more complex over billions of years than to say that complex things like eyes and humans have an even more complex origin, a god. That's just answering a question with a bigger question. Without evolution by natural selection, absolutely nothing we're observing in biology makes any sense, and we can see evolution at work by sequencing DNA (even rewriting DNA!), in fossils, in selective breeding of plants and insides and bacteria (antibiotics, etc), in zoological categorization, in geographical and temporal diversity of species, etc. We can see it in action, we know it works.

It is a good book. I've read it. I also have Collapse by Diamond, but I haven't read that one yet.

You'll find a lot of discussion of this in Dawkins' writings. But basically, postulating a god as an answer to these questions is just answering them with an even bigger question, so it's no answer at all. It's like saying in ancient times: "How does the sun work?" "God makes it work!" "Well, how does god work then?" While the correct answer we now know is nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms under massive pressure from the star's own gravity well :) But if you really want to go deep into each of those topics, there are neuroscience textbooks (I have this one: http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/ though I can't say I've read it all), biology textbooks, cosmology textbooks, cognitive-language stuff (Pinker is an expert on that - http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ and http://www.amazon.com/The-Stuff-Thought-Language-Window/dp/0143114247/) etc. Lots of answers for you there, but remember that things we don't know (yet) just mean that we don't know, they don't automatically mean that there must be something supernatural behind it. A way to instinctively get that is to think back to all the questions that we've answered about how the world works during the past 300 years, and ask if back then it would have been rational to postulate supernatural causes for them. So is it any more rational now? It's ok not to know some things. When we get evidence to fill that hole, we should look into it, but without evidence, that square should stay blank until we find some. Mysteries don't exist in nature. The mysteries are in our mind; they are on the map, not on the territory, so postulating 'a mystery' as an answer to something isn't really an answer, it's a confusion between the map and the territory. As a rule, if after an answer you don't know more than before, it's not really an answer :)

[amazonsearch]How To Get Rich[/amazonsearch] This one is more of a motivational/inspirational book. There's lots of advice and wisdom in it, but I think the main benefit I'm getting out of it is psychic rather than tactical or strategical. Dennis is a publishing magnate and certainly has a big ego, but he's also often self-deprecating and has a way with words, so it's a pleasant read if you aren't looking for something that the book isn't (if that makes sense). I'm about halfway through, and the central message seems to be that getting really rich is really hard, and you won't succeed if you don't really want it and aren't ready to disregard advice from well-meaning people around you who want to steer you to the 'normal' path of least resistance (get a job, stop obsessing about this thing, give up when things are bad, etc) and persevere through a lot of crap and bad times. A lot is about steeling yourself for the marathon and picking the right goals (if you want to be rich -- if you have other goals, that's fine, but being rich rarely happens by accident so if it's not your explicit goal, it probably won't happen). Anyway, I woulnd't necessarily call it a 'must-read' for investors here (at least not yet -- maybe the second half is amazing), but if like me you like to alternate between more technical readings and more 'meta' inspirational/biographical stuff, this might be one worth putting on the list.

Will do. I just put a hold on the revised edition at the library. ;)

I guess my wife would probably describe me as a book with legs. I've structured my whole life and work to have as much unstructured time as possible - kind of like Buffett, except I did it because it fits with my personality, I only learned later that it's what he also did - to pursue whatever interests I have, and that includes reading lots of books on various topics. To me having all that unstructured time available is the key to getting better at investing. If I had a busy schedule and constantly had to fit investing-related reading into holes, it probably wouldn't work as well. It also gives me a lot of time to post here, as my post count can attest... Sorry guys :)

If you read it, feel free to private message me with your thoughts. I'm curious to know what you think. Cheers!

Indeed, that ability to recognize human cues was bred in over-time. Dogs that do what you tell them to and can read your moods have higher value than those who do not, so there's higher selective pressure and those will have on average more offsprings via human-guided selective breeding, over time making those traits generalized in the population (it's fascinating to me that even very small advantages can mean that certain adaptations/genes take over a whole population over enough generations -- the math is slightly counter-intuitive). Evolutionary science if fascinating. I recommend this classic book on the subject by George C. Williams: http://www.amazon.com/Adaptation-Natural-Selection-Christopher-Williams/dp/0691026157/

If you are really open to it, read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. If you don't find those arguments convincing, then you'll be able to say that you've really looked at the good arguments in favor of a non-supernatural universe. Lots of religious people do ad hominem attacks against Dawkins and cherry pick what he says, but I've yet to find a religious person who has actually read him. Maybe, but there's the No True Scotsman problem here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman If everytime someone religious does something bad we post-facto says he wasn't really religious or wasn't doing it right, you don't end up with religion as much of a predictor for anything. I have read them, which is why I call them magical books. That's what they claim, no? Telepathy, transmutation, supernatural occurances and miracles, raising people form the dead and killing whole nations because voices in people's heads said so, invisibility, talking animals, disembodied presences and entities, prophecies, virgin births, burning bushes, whole seas defying gravity, other dimensions (or at least some places we can't find where some stuff supposedly is), etc. If that's not magic, then I don't know what the word magic should be used for. If someone came to you and told you they had witnessed any of that today, you'd probably say they believed in magic, yet they would be a more reliable first-hand witness than a centuries-old book from an era back when there was not tradition of objective reporting of facts (scientific method, journalistic method, photographic or video evidence, a literate population brought up with critical thinking, etc), and pretty much all of it written years after the supposed events by non-eyewitnesses. Those two books are very interesting for a whole lot more than any religious argument, I highly recommend them as they are an excellent study of human nature and can help investors. I haven't read that one, I'll put it on the list. Cheers.