flâneur

Austin Lee

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on the atlas — 57

highlights — 28

  • It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the wo…
    Theodore Roosevelt - The Man in the Arena
  • To B.F. Skinner, "Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?"
    Language Log » Morgenbesserisms
  • The Gamer/Arbitrageur to Generalist Pipeline
    The Gamer/Arbitrageur to Generalist Pipeline
  • The highlight of the program for me was the triple billing of Bruce Wasserstein, Marty Lipton, and Leon Black, who did a creditable job of talking past each other in a very deferential and collegial manner. So polished was their family juggling act—Uncle Brucie, Grampa Martin, and precocious Little Leon—that they might want to consider the circus should credit armageddon or a Democratic Administration truly shut down the merger game for good. For such a large bear of a man, Leon Black constantly surprises me when he opens his mouth to release a little, high-pitched voice more suited in my view…
    The Epicurean Dealmaker: Being Bruce Wasserstein
  • At the same time, I know in my bones that if I had gotten tapped by St. Elmo’s, I would have taken it and likely wouldn’t have developed a critical mode of participation.
    ZOU: I belong because you don’t - Yale Daily News
  • For Kant then a ‘transcendental deduction’ starts from a premise concerning some feature of human experience, a premise which reasonable interlocutors might be expected to endorse, and then argues to a substantive philosophical conclusion concerning the presuppositions or necessary conditions of the truth of that premise. Since Kant’s concern here is the a priori categories, his aim is to show that a presupposition or necessary condition of some relatively uncontroversial feature of experience is the applicability of the a priori concept(s) in question to the objects of experience.
    Kant on the Categories & Causation
  • We don’t blame Ancient Eight society members of marginalized backgrounds for choosing to take part. After three long years of feeling out of place at Yale, it’s hard to turn down an offer of status and acceptance. Frankly, curiosity alone may be reason enough. But for students of marginalized backgrounds, it’s also important to be critical about why your presence is desired and what your presence does. You may be using societies, but these organizations are also using and exploiting you. Your participation means that the relevance and credibility that is the lifeblood of these organizations en…
    BAYULGEN & DANIEL: For the Ancient Eight and beyond, diversity means survival - Yale Daily News
  • In coming up with a trading strategy for warrants, Ed discovered a handy formula. A few years later, three finance professors independently came up with their own slight mathematical variant of the same formula. Ed Thorp, Myron Scholes, Robert Merton, and Fischer Black all had almost the same formula, but each had a different reason for believing it was true. Ed showed that it was a way to make money, Scholes that it was required for market efficiency, Merton that it had to be true or there would be arbitrage, and Black that it was required for market equilibrium. Black's insight turned out to…
    Ed Thorp and the Black-Scholes Model
  • Are banks Marxist paradises?
    Banks As Socialist Collectives - Bloomberg
  • Dasein confronts every concrete situation in which it finds itself (into which it has been thrown) as a range of possibilities for acting (onto which it may project itself). Insofar as some of these possibilities are actualized, others will not be, meaning that there is a sense in which not-Being (a set of unactualized possibilities of Being) is a structural component of Dasein's Being. Out of this dynamic interplay, Dasein emerges as a delicate balance of determination (thrownness) and freedom (projection). The projective possibilities available to Dasein are delineated by totalities of invol…
    Martin Heidegger (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • How does all this relate to Heidegger's account of truth? Answering this question adds a new dimension to the pivotal phenomenon of revealing. Heidegger points out that the philosophical tradition standardly conceives of truth as attaching to propositions, and as involving some sort of correspondence between propositions and states of affairs. But whereas for the tradition (as Heidegger characterizes it), propositional truth as correspondence exhausts the phenomenon of truth, for Heidegger, it is merely the particular manifestation of truth that is operative in those domains, such as science, …
    Martin Heidegger (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Okay, so Ms Faust obviously didn't receive the memo that Moody's reputation for trustworthiness and probity currently ranks somewhere below that of Adolf Hitler or Caligula, but the rest of her remarks are sound.
    The Epicurean Dealmaker: Et in Arcadia Ego
  • [In March 2008.] I learned a lot at Soros, but not what I thought I would learn. I did not learn what makes the yen go up or down, or what makes the stock market go up or down. Soros’s great gift was how to use leverage, and how much money to have down based on the risk/reward and your sense of conviction. His view on the yen or the euro was better than random, but not much. And yet he was still one of the great money managers ever because he knew how to bet his convictions.
    Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes
  • particularly public stuff is kept quiet. If you want to find out what they're buying, though, you can start digging through all the LLCs on EDGAR (though I warn you there are a ton of them). As long as it's price hasn't heavily moved during the quarter you also get an idea of what they're willing to pay for something. Working backwards from there can actually be an excellent exercise since they're very, very good on the analysis side.
    Which Investment Letters Do You Find Most Helpful? : r/SecurityAnalysis
  • And what we've done historically, is actually, even though you refer to me as a macro investor, and many people have, is we do the macro by a compilation of listening to companies and doing a bottoms up analysis of industries that lead the economy and industries that lag the economy. And if the leading industries are turning up or turning down, that's a signal. And that's worked beautifully historically.
    Letter #40: John Collison and Stan Druckenmiller (2022)
  • Thesis 1.0. Large networks of engaged users, differentiated through user experience, and defensible through network effects. Thesis 2.0. As the market matures, we look for less obvious network effects, infrastructure for the new economy, and enablers of open decentralized data. Thesis 3.0. Enabling trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks, platforms, and protocols.
    Union Square Ventures: The Thinkers | The Generalist
  • the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. How was the place different from what they expected? This is an extremely useful question. You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording.
    The Age of the Essay
  • An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know. But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander. The Meander (aka Menderes) is a …
    The Age of the Essay
  • uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury. Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to kn…
    The Age of the Essay
  • One drawback of this approach is that it won't produce the sort of writing that gets you tenure. And not just because it's not currently the fashion. In order to get tenure in any field you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with. In practice there are two kinds of solutions to this problem. In math and the sciences, you can prove what you're saying, or at any rate adjust your conclusions so you're not claiming anything false ("6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the treatment"). In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite c…
    How to Do Philosophy
  • We may be able to do better. Here's an intriguing possibility. Perhaps we should do what Aristotle meant to do, instead of what he did. The goal he announces in the Metaphysics seems one worth pursuing: to discover the most general truths. That sounds good. But instead of trying to discover them because they're useless, let's try to discover them because they're useful. I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of abstractions. Instead of trying to answer the question: What are the most gener…
    How to Do Philosophy
  • The real lesson here is that the concepts we use in everyday life are fuzzy, and break down if pushed too hard. Even a concept as dear to us as I. It took me a while to grasp this, but when I did it was fairly sudden, like someone in the nineteenth century grasping evolution and realizing the story of creation they'd been told as a child was all wrong. [2] Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings. Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in ever…
    How to Do Philosophy
  • I think it's gotten a bad rap because people assume it's attempting to be realistic. Ayn Rand herself stated that she was not trying to write about men as they are but as they could and presumably should be. The title itself should give it away. Daphne, Francisco, Galt, they are not supposed to be regular humans or even great men but Titans unbound by the rules of men and society. Like the heroes of Homeric epics they are not meant to be "round" characters but single minded entities beset by tragedies and the twists and turns of fate. Achilles is smug, Agamemmnon is smug. It causes problems fo…
    Why is atlas shrugged so popular? : r/books
  • American dynamism is for builders. It is the belief that the values upon which the country was founded are real and worth defending. Dynamism is also a feeling: the feeling of growth, movement, momentum, and opportunity that makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life, career or company in. I believe strongly in this ongoing and historic American experiment and the values that unite us. And I look forward to championing the founders who believe that America’s best days are just ahead.
    Building American Dynamism | Andreessen Horowitz
  • It’s now easier to solve critical national problems through startups. For one, many of these companies and their respective problems require large capital investment, and venture capitalists are better at taking on risk and allocating capital than agencies in Washington. Venture capital is also better at monitoring outcomes: it turns out that professional investors, even in a bull market, care more about value creation than bureaucrats who are not measured by or compensated for their success. The best comparison is that in the last two decades, roughly $1 trillion has gone to venture-backed co…
    Building American Dynamism | Andreessen Horowitz
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    The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership
  • fatal flaws / our biggest delusions we hold
    arielle lok
  • one of my benchmarks for selecting outstanding close friends is questioning: if my child was a carbon copy personality of said friend, how happy/proud would i be?
    arielle lok