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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

fourmilab.ch

121–130 of 186 posts

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#121

SNL made a wonderful infomercial in 2006 about point 3: avoid debt. Depending on your location you should be able to watch it in [1] or [2]. During my years in the US it always puzzled me that, upon reaching my credit limit, it would not just increase without any interaction, but sometimes double! American "plastic", as hailed in "The Graduate", was a significant lesson for me. [1] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-l…

I was always puzzled how people in the US are quick to spend on credit, and not worry too much...

One of the great western habits I inherited after living in the US for 15 years, is the use of the credit card for everything, and then just paying a single bill (the credit card) every month. If you do it properly, it can really increase the quality of your life - rewards, points, etc. - and it can also be very, very dangerous for the undisciplined and income-averse ..

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#122
post #114

From Frenzied Finance (1905): First, there is a fundamental law, from which no one—neither the great nor the small—is exempt. In substance it is: "Every 'Standard Oil' man must wear the 'Standard Oil' collar." This collar is riveted on to each one as he is taken into "the band," and can only be removed with the head of the wearer. Here is the code. The penalty for infringing the following rules is instant "removal."…

> 5. Never put "Standard Oil" trades in writing This is good advice?

If you are Standard Oil and are vastly larger than whoever it you are trading with, have a huge legal team and no doubt some friendly judges handy.

Mind you - I have worked with very senior people who would avoid putting things in writing and then a few months later always have a notably different account of conversations than I did. At first I thought I was actually forgetting things until I realised it's a trick used by overly political types.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to a talk on counterinsurgency given by David Kilcullen (I am about 90% sure, it could have been Nagl), but he asked the audience about whether it was better to learn from experience or from academics. The audience was about evenly split but with a lot of abstainers, and he said academia was the better choice of course, because no on ever died from reading a book. While "teachable moments" in most contexts…

It's a completely different matter between learning from theory and learning in practice. What's sorely missing from theoretical teaching is context - knowing when and how to apply this knowledge - and the actual experience of using it, which is critical to remembering what was taught. From my experience on this planet, purely theoretical teachings tend to be forgotten in favor of things you've actually used and done…

This logic always sounds good but I have a hard time really placing times when even in retrospect I lacked some wisdom from doing in order to apply the theory.

I've had plenty of times where I lacked both the theory and the scraped elbows (creating shared state clusterfucks that seemed clever at the time), and times when I was missing the theory alone (mechanically reaching for the OO hammer because there was a nail-shaped screw in front of me).

In all programming instances I can think of where I had the theory but not the experience I knew that there was a lot I didn't know and read about the implementation issues and went and bothered smarter people about it. Of course I wr[i|o]te plenty of shitty code in various contexts. I guess we can say that's the experience happening, but that's a bit unsatisfying as a model.

With the theoretical learning you get measurably better: if you've literally never even heard of time complexity, or read the latency numbers everyone should know, you're more likely to write some code with some garbage performance. Once you know about it you're unlikely to write grossly nested loops making unnecessary un-batched requests to servers 12 timezones away, or if you do you'll at least feel gross about it and it will be a (bad) choice not a mistake.

With experience with a particular technology you do as well. Knowing the Widget API inside out and knowing which Widget calls are lazy vs eager and which get cached or whatever are going to improve your code and get it written faster, but the gains are much more marginal than the theoretical knowledge. With enough practice learning new APIs gets easier. Remembering arbitrary incantations is something everyone eventually gets fairly good at. I think most of HN would do very well at Hogwarts. Assuming you already know how to program, I bet just reading something like Clean Code is likely to improve your JS quality more than an equivalent time spent churning out new JS (even though the example language in CC isn't JS so any benefit would be ported through theory).

It's very cheap to implement theoretical concepts in practice and I think a lot of dismissiveness towards "theoretical" things are defensive insecurities and/or lazy, probably at the same rate that "premature optimization" is utilized in such causes. Software has a very narrow gulf between practical and theoretical.

In domains where experience and theory are farther apart I propose that it's not so much experience being better than theoretical knowledge, rather the theoretical knowledge is frequently just plain wrong or extended beyond its applicability.

Look at the FBI's terrible high-school surveillance program that was linked here recently. It's based off of really garbage pseudo-science concerning extremist radicalization. There is better, more modern research on the subject, which should be used instead, but even then caution should prevail and less theoretical and more informed logic and experienced based decisions might ultimately be wiser. In a healthy field of study and practice, as time goes on and more data gets accumulated theory increasingly approaches reality.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#124
post #67

It's interesting how flat human nature stays over time, how advice given 136 years ago is still perfectly applicable today. Over the course of centuries life has changed dramatically, but we still think, worry, feel and act like our ancestors did from a millennium ago. I'd bet you could easily find advice given in the roman empire times that would still be relevant today.

I'd argue that most of life has been figured out by many, many people thousands of years ago. Greek philosophers had the exact same problems we do today, and over their lifetime they've been pretty successful at figuring out solutions. I'd even argue that most "self-help" books of today are just the same old solutions written in a different way.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always puzzled how people in the US are quick to spend on credit, and not worry too much...

One of the great western habits I inherited after living in the US for 15 years, is the use of the credit card for everything, and then just paying a single bill (the credit card) every month. If you do it properly, it can really increase the quality of your life - rewards, points, etc. - and it can also be very, very dangerous for the undisciplined and income-averse ..

the income-averse; I have yet to meet those.

work-averse or income-challenged maybe. Or underpaid or poor.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#126
post #103
post #67

It's interesting how flat human nature stays over time, how advice given 136 years ago is still perfectly applicable today. Over the course of centuries life has changed dramatically, but we still think, worry, feel and act like our ancestors did from a millennium ago. I'd bet you could easily find advice given in the roman empire times that would still be relevant today.

There are things from 1000's of years ago that are still relevant. But I think it's mostly survivorship bias. The very few things from long ago that we still read, are still relevant today. That's why we know about them! Take a random book from from most periods of history, and it will be uninteresting, if not outright unintelligible, to a modern audience.

> Take a random book from from most periods of history

I'd be very interested in doing in doing just that. How would I go about it? Weighted by popularity in that era would be fine, but not weighted according to current popularity.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#127

SNL made a wonderful infomercial in 2006 about point 3: avoid debt. Depending on your location you should be able to watch it in [1] or [2]. During my years in the US it always puzzled me that, upon reaching my credit limit, it would not just increase without any interaction, but sometimes double! American "plastic", as hailed in "The Graduate", was a significant lesson for me. [1] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-l…

I was always puzzled how people in the US are quick to spend on credit, and not worry too much...

They are acclimatised to debt - most westerners can't imagine not having a credit card - when I tell folks I cut up my first and last card at 17 they assume I'm a delinquent, broke, punishing myself - for in this society we have managed to redefine debt as wealth.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always puzzled how people in the US are quick to spend on credit, and not worry too much...

One of the great western habits I inherited after living in the US for 15 years, is the use of the credit card for everything, and then just paying a single bill (the credit card) every month. If you do it properly, it can really increase the quality of your life - rewards, points, etc. - and it can also be very, very dangerous for the undisciplined and income-averse ..

For those I know, including myself and my partner, the habit to strive for is spending less, and I agree that credit can be a useful tool if used wisely, but never really know when life can throw a curve ball. For now, we use credit cards, but manage to eliminate our debt by paying everything soon after incurring debt. Call it using debt for leverage I suppose. For any big purchase (which is rare), we aim to use credit when no interest penalties are present and pay off before any are incurred. A small house, inexpensive vehicles, and thrifty habits even with the use of credit cards allowed us to save quite a bit in contrast to those heavily in debt with terrible credit, but it is still a gamble. I don't blame others for having debt. There are many reasons for this. Without any major life events this system works for us...until perhaps it doesn't.

Re: Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)

#130
Some of these advices are in harmony with thousands old maxim "fortune favours the prepared", which not only hints that so-called success is much more a result of chance, like almost everything else in the universe, but also correlate with the notions of avoiding a debt, concentration and persistence. But the chance is still the major factor.

BTW, the parts of the Patanjali Yoga Sutra, which gives practical advice about the practice - about necessity of an appropriate isolated place, diet, habits with emphasis on sleep cycle, proper state of mind, concentration and persistence - is the best universal advice to achieve anything in life that I am aware of. The word Yoga could be translated as "discipline", and has little to do with asanas, mats, and yoga pants.

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