Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: politics

  • Making Decisions

    Jonah Lehrer over in Boston writes about how people make decisions. The most famous decider is in the White House, and goes with his gut, to the exclusion of obvious evidence to the contrary in some cases. John McCain is similar in style, preferring to make quick decisions and live with them without complaint. I think he expects us to do the same. Then there is Barak Obama, who weighs, things, ponders, evaluates and only then decides.

    Which is the best style? Actually, scientists have been discovering that going with the gut, but also knowing how your own gut works, is the best.

    Rather, it’s the willingness to engage in introspection, to cultivate what Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, calls “the art of self-overhearing

  • Voting and Elections

    There are elections in the US coming up soon, and it looks likely that there will be elections here in Japan as well. I’m really saddened that in both of “my” countries, only about half the people vote. I have to spend a lot of time to vote in the US, and I can’t vote here in Japan, and I can’t understand people that CAN vote, but DON’T. Sad. Watch this YouTube video and see what these famous actors think.

  • Utterly Cynical GOP

    Saw this first on Digg, where the GOP is trying to use foreclosure roles in Michigan to deny people the vote.

    How sadly, sinisterly ironic is this. Deregulate the mortgage lending industry so that the market collapses and voters get booted from their homes. Use this information to eliminate these disgruntled voters from the polling place. (posted by Knute5)

  • Woes on Wall Street, Black Swans

    I woke up this morning and opened my browser, and found the Dow down 500 points, to less than 11,000. Lehman Brothers is filing for protection against bankruptcy (Chapter 11, the lesser of the two evils.) Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America for the bargain basement price of $50 billion. AIG needs about $40 billion to stay afloat, and is having a hard time finding it. The soveriegn funds are shying away from US investments. We have have turned a corner here. I put a big chunk of money into Euros just before the summer. Glad I did.

    I also received the newsletter The Edge (see below), this time with Nassim Taleb railing agains the Quants. The Quants are the people in the banking industry and in regulation that use statistics (quatifiable methods) to make their decisions. The problem, Taleb says, is that they don’t use the tools correctly, or they use the tools for personal gain at the expense of the institution they are working with. It seems statiticians, true statiticians, are a lot more circumspect when making analyses on data that is less than quantifiable, what Taleb terms the Fourth Quadrant. A good read for scary times.