Human Behavior

Communal Memory and Financial Markets

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Via Instapundit, an interesting NYT column about how quickly, after a natural disaster, people start to over-discount the risks of future disasters, especially in advanced societies:

Communal memory of rare disasters is worse in more developed societies because knowledge now is passed on in schools, movies or the internet leaving no time for oral history or reliance on the elders to learn about the world.

Something similar to the quick-forgetting phenomenon happens in financial markets. In every market, some players prosper for a while by following trading strategies that tend to be highly profitable from day to day but that are almost guaranteed to be big long-term losers: martingales, naked out-of-the-money option writing and other short-gamma strategies. Every time there is a big market event, a lot of these players suffer large losses and go out of business. They move on to other businesses (I assume) and are no longer around to warn market newcomers to avoid the kind of risky, short-term-profitable strategies that they themselves once followed. So there is a constant stream of new traders who enter the markets and rediscover risk.

This is an oversimplification, since the better traders, by definition, somehow learn how to stay in the game for the long term. But the behavioral parallels between market traders and people who rebuild villages in flood zones — and countries that seek to appease their enemies — seem clear. The common element is lack of an adequate inter-generational feedback mechanism. I doubt that there is a remedy for this pattern of human behavior (I wouldn’t characterize it as a “problem” any more than I would say that rain is a weather problem) other than for people to study history more.

“The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT “

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Via Reddit.com:

The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT – Somebody’s got to do them — and hopefully that somebody isn’t you.

I especially like this:

Dirty IT job No. 5: On-site reboot specialist

Seeking individuals for on-site support of end-users. Must be familiar with three-fingered Ctrl-Alt-Del salute and power cord reconfiguration. Ability to withstand a variety of environments and personality types; concealed-weapons permit a plus. Individuals with anger management issues need not apply.

Closely related to the help desk zombie, but even lower on the totem pole, is the on-site reboot specialist, says Scott Crawford, research director at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. Unlike help desk or support vampires, the on-site rebootnik must venture out into the physical world and deal with actual people.

[ For more fear and loathing of end-user interaction, check out the original “Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories”]

If you think that this passage suggests a certain level of misanthrophy you haven’t had to put up with enough of the anthropoi out there yet.

No Parking

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My friend Nathan and I differ greatly in our perspective of how and when film crews ought to be allowed to close off parking in the maze that is Manhattan’s Chinatown. You can catch some of our debate here and here.

What it comes down to for me, as a libertarian, is that the film studios are using the coercive power of the state to force (see if the police won’t clear away any protests before you object to my use of the word “force”, especially if the protestor is a lone businessman) the neighborhood into accepting something that will benefit the private film company, and a minority of the businesses there. The difference from the Suzette Kelo case is only a matter of degree.

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Making a Man: Rescue as Redemption

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Appealing to a man’s strength is a coquette’s trick (& a man’s weakness), but it works.   Calvin Trillin repeats his father’s advice “You might as well be a mensch.”   A man wants to be heroic, virtuous, strong, manly.   My daughter explained her husband’s appeal: she could count on him to take care of her.   That view of him was her appeal.   (My somewhat strident daughter stands at 5’10” and holds many fully formed opinions she doesn’t appear dependent. But she leans on him.)    A boy becomes a man by finding his strength; however, heroism  rescuing a community from plagues and a princess from a dragon has taken a sentimental turn.   We’ve always found vulnerability  attractive, but a pattern has emerged in which the hero rescues the most vulnerable seeing in a child his own unformed self.   The rescue redeems. The hero’s transcendence, increasingly difficult in our ironic world, remains possible with a fragile baby or toddler.

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Rape is Rape, But Some People Have a Problem With The Concept

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Long time readers know that I run a charity self defense course for violent crime survivors. I’ve been doing it for so long that word of mouth brings me more work than I can handle.

But it wasn’t always like that. When I was just starting out, decades ago, I would visit encounter groups and seminars to pass out some business cards and let people look me over so they wouldn’t be so self conscious if they dialed my number. Some of these seminars were more crowded than others.

The first seminar I ever attended for male rape victims was at one of the local hotels here in Columbus, Ohio. I was shocked to see how many people were there! It was standing room only, with men leaning against the walls and sitting in the aisles between rows of folding chairs.

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