On the 8 Spot

Hehe, I have a tendency to be an introvert, this is because I ask people the hard questions, I often fail to not get affected. I want people to be “REAL” to have “VALUE”.

It takes a surprising amount of energy to stop myself, that’s why I often opt not to play, its hard.

Why is it hard? Because People Don’t Want The Truth. maybe They Can’t Handle The Truth.

We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works just as long as everybody’s winking at the same time. If one person stops winking, you just beat the crap out of that person, and they either starting winking or go somewhere else.

Rate Your Students: “Students Today Are Completely Full of Shit.”.

I wanna watch this!

Hollywood for ugly people: awards season in Washington

Mon, 01/12/2009 – 6:46pm

The big winner at last night’s Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire, succeeds at levels that almost certainly never entered into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s calculus when they voted awards for the film, its director, its screenplay and its score. They were almost certainly most focused on the extraordinarily compelling stories of its main characters, the quality of the film-making, the deft structure, acting, directing, the usual stuff of movie-making. But the film captures the life and the spirit of Mumbai and of much of India, depicts a world alien to most in America who will see it, and at the same time both captures and, through its own success worldwide, illustrates the transformation not just of its of its leading character, Jamal, but of his ever-present co-star, modern India itself.

Juxtaposing the brutal poverty of Mumbai’s slums with the glitter and promise of a global television phenomenon like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, the film offers a kind of energizing fugal counterpoint that is full of hope and at the same time condemnation of the gaps that divide the poorest from the globalizing world. Jamal, like all picaresque heroes, becomes our guide, introducing us first to the crushing poverty of the world into which he was born and then to the steps he takes up the path he and his brother follow in search first of survival and later of more rewarding lives. It is almost inevitable that such an evocation of contemporary India must lead him through a job in a call center…just as his ultimate deliverance through his performance on the game show places him in the most global setting possible because it is also the most culturally denuded setting possible. The world is never flatter (which is to say more two dimensional) than it is on an international game-show hit. His use of a cell phone as a lifeline in the game echoes the role that modern technology is playing in transforming the world of even the poorest. The scene in which he and his brother stand atop sky scrapers that overlook what once was the slum from which they came also speaks to the stunning degree of the changes sweeping their country, even as the brother’s enrichment as a cog in a gangster’s empire comments on the mixed bag that rapid prosperity brings with it. (As the recent scandal at Satyam also illustrates.)

But beyond the effectiveness of the structure in which each chapter of his life is linked to a question he faces on “Millionaire,” beyond the way the story provides a window into many of the themes central to an Indian transformation that echoes Jamal’s, what is most potent and ultimately transcendent about the movie are the scenes of Jamal, his brother Salim and Jamal’s life-long love Latika as children facing brutality and the very worst hands fate can deal us with extraordinary hope, with laughter, and with inextinguishable vitality. They should despair. But they always believe there is something more. It’s this spirit, which I have seen in every struggling corner of the planet and which I feel in particular animates all of India that is so indelible and telling. That anyone should ever suffer as so many children do — and roughly 40,000 die every day of preventable causes worldwide — is inexcusable but that it does not crush them and still these great countries are finding a path to elevate themselves is the story and the great hope of the 21st century. (And their fate is our greatest responsibility.)

Hollywood for ugly people: awards season in Washington | David Rothkopf.

I have a post on rules of thumb written in one of my notebooks (The problems of only being able to write in using pen and paper, is you have to type it later, argh).

One of my points is that Rules Of Thumbs are incomplete if they are not accompanied with the bounds that they are effective.

Rationality is a Property of Equilibrium

Some thoughts on rationality and economics, perhaps for a future paper, motivated by the financial panic:

Rationality is a property of equilibrium. By this I mean that rationality is habitual and experience-based and it becomes effective as it becomes embedded in the rules of thumb and collective wisdom of market participants. Rules of thumb approximate rational decision rules as market participants become familiar with an economic environment. Individuals per se are not very rational; shift the equilibrium enough so that the old rules of thumb no longer apply and we are likely to see bubbles, manias, panics and crashes. Significant innovation is thus almost always going to come accompanied with a wave of irrationality. When we shift to a significant, new equilibrium rationality itself is not strong enough to tie down behavior and unmoored by either reason or experience individuals flail about liked naked apes – this is the realm of behavioral economics. Given time, however, new rules of thumb evolve and rationality once again rules but only until the next big innovation arrives.

Posted by Alex Tabarrok on January 13, 2009 at 07:20 AM | Permalink

Marginal Revolution: Rationality is a Property of Equilibrium.