Something good had to come out of the financial meltdown

This must be read to be believed.

Hedge fund investor Andrew Lahde retired in style at 37, leaving behind the ripest farewell letter you ever saw. You can read the whole letter here. The whole financial sector gets lambasted, from Lahde's rivals (whom he candidly calls "idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA") right down to their very lifestyle.

It's only right that somebody as jaded as Mr. Lahde would go into a field he would prefer not to, become one of the players and succeeds wildly by playing the game to the hilt, and then reveal the game for the dysfunctional burning house it is. It's too bad the word could only come out of the ashes.

I can't say the financial sector is inherently evil; that seems more ideological than factual. But certainly there were folks who thought they could work the system in their favor. And the consequences of such short-term thinking, by so many people, came together in an awful way. They were in it for the money, and so was Lahde. The difference: Lahde knew what he was about, and he knew what the game was all about. His fallout rivals knew neither.

Moo

Um, this was just too utterly bizarre - had to post a link to this little animation I ran across:



Wow.

Another chapter in the cautionary tale that is moi

Here's something I just figured out; I wish I'd learned it sooner, but better late than never. Hopefully it'll help you too, either by making you recognize the problem in yourself or by spurring you to identify the root of your problem. And we all have problems.

One of my problems is procrastination. Particularly, as Eliot so nicely put it, "Distracted from distractions by distractions." Here I am, sitting in my dank little studio, the rough draft of my dissertation sitting before me. The deadline hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles. And I'm surfing the Internet. Do I realize this? Not always: sometimes it only hits me that two hours have slipped by while giggling my way through LOLCats. (Yes, it's true - I love that stuff.) Of course the time can't be recovered, so I have no choice but to drag my discouraged ass away from the monitor and...work. But it's 11pm or whatever, so no point.

Last night I ran across two long paragraphs that need serious work. Not putting the same material into new words, but recasting the whole damn thing from scratch. It went in the direction I wanted it to go, but the elements were wrong and the formulation unclear. I have to rewrite it from the ground up. - Ouch. (I should be used to it by now, having rewritten half a chapter already. But apparently some things you just don't get used to.) Did I start that rewriting? No, I checked my email. And Facebook. And did searches on authors that have no relevance whatsoever to my dissertation. In between Web pages, I'd jot down something on the back of an envelope, vaguely dissertation-related. But you can't get anything done that way. As soon as I realized the absurdity of it all, I packed it in. It was 11pm, and I couldn't think straight, so I just went to bed - not that I got any sleep.

Today I picked up where I'd left off, and got through a few more pages. This time I tried to work out a logical question: why conditionals are asymmetrical. Why does P imply Q, but not the other way around? The truth table describes the asymmetry, it doesn't explain it. I finally got it (it has to do with dependence), but my scribblings and citations didn't quite bear out. Hmmm...what about those files I've been meaning to organize?

And then it hit me *dork!*: I distract myself when something doesn't fulfil my expectations. Since nobody's around to kick my ass back on track, two hours can easily get lost before I know what happened. It's like I said, "Oh, that didn't work. Screw it." The rational response would be to say, "OK, why didn't it work out? What's the real answer, as opposed to the one I'd believed?" Then and only then would I stand to learn something new, better than what I'd thought before.

So now it comes down to this: I'll find a way to make a habit of asking that question whenever experience runs counter to my expectations. Or die trying. (Better the former than the latter.) It's not my only problem, but it'll be one less to worry about when I get over it.

There's a lesson here. (I dislike moralizing, but this seems important enough to add.) If you've got the same kind of problem, take up the same solution. But even if you don't distract yourself when events let you down, you probably have other problems you need to solve. For what it's worth, I'm suggesting you keep watch for them. Find that nasty habit - big or little, it doesn't matter. Dig up the reason why you do it, and find a way to get yourself back on track. You'll be glad you did. Because you'll discover - no, experience a bit more of the real meaning of "The truth will set you free." You don't have to be religious to know how true that statement is.