Curiosity Over Pride (FYI: To comment, send an e-mail to scifidink@gmail.com)

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Interesting Development

6 comments:

Dr John said...

Well that cannot be good.What could have possibly motivated that. Paranoid psychosis I guess.

Thai said...

Have you ever read any Niall Ferguson?

He has been very influential in my thinking in recent years.

Dr John said...

No, but it looks like I should. What book first?

Thai said...

So many great ones to chose from.

I really liked The Cash Nexus as well as The War of the World as well as The Ascent of Money and also Colossus (about American empire).

In particular, Ferguson's analysis of the European bond markets right up to the brink of World War I were some of the most eye opening pages I have ever read.

Reading about the bond market was truly one of those Eureka moments (at least for me) as it showed so clearly how we live life forwards yet understand it backwards and further how much I make this same mistake.

... Of course you and I intuitively understand this in our careers as physicians, but before I read that chapter on bonds just prior to WWI, I forgot how much I commit the same error in every other sphere of my life.

So when I later read The Black Swan and his even better Fooled by Randomness, all this investing just "clicked" with my our career in medicine, etc...

For it is quite clear, investors trying to predict the future are no different than you and I as physicians trying to predict the future for our patients. And all those med school lectures on Bayesian probabilities, etc... as well as the lectures on the problems of such models (which are the bane of you and I and every diagnostician I know) came back to me in an instant.

After that, I started re-reading about chaos/complexity/fractals, etc...

And we are chatting today- e.g. the rest is history so to speak

OkieLawyer said...

What does Niall Ferguson have to do with a video about evidence that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean ship?

What was the point about posting the video?

Thai said...

Hey Okie!

Good question.

I'm not really sure other than somehow this news clip reminded me of Niall Ferguson and JP's comments about how we are entering the time of the Caesars.

There is a lot of potential for military instability over something like this and Ferguson tend to write about stuff like this.

But it is kind of a free association of thought post.

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