Due Dilligence

Due Diligence is the reasonable steps required to gather information before entering into an agreement or taking action. Looking before you cross the road. Price is not value. Price is a signal of supply and demand. If something is incredibly valuable to lots of people, but is abundant, its price will be low. Whether your skills and knowledge are valuable is not in question. Meritocracy is not based on ranking skills and knowledge, it is based on barriers to entry. A competitive advantage is not what you are good at. It is why others cannot do what you are doing, which keeps it in short supply. Choices have consequences. We do not live in isolation. When it comes to money, you have to do your due diligence. You make money through the conscious construction of a container. It is not about respect or worth. That is your personal practice of conquering the demons in your head and heart. Money making is solving problems for decision makers with money. It is not about you. It is doing what you have to do, so you can do what you want to do.

Look before you cross the road

Cause and Effect

I am distrustful of cause and effect. I think nature is too. That is partly why our ability to disagree and interpret things differently is so powerful. There is consciousness in the sense of awareness of what is going on now. Then, there is consciousness in the sense of connecting those nows in a meaningful way.

Two big obstacles to those stories, are Spurious Correlations and Confounding Variables.

Spurious is like a combination of spew, furious and hilarious. It is the fake news of statistics. Two things appear connected or correlated. That is not because they are. It is because we are pattern seekers in an incredibly random world. Two things can dance together just because. We will add meaning even though it is not there.

Tyler Vigen collects these kind of amusing dances that point out that 'correlation does not equal causation'. The number of people who drowned by falling into a pool, is correlated with the number of films Nicolas Cage appeared in. 

A Confounding Variable is something that confuses everything. It may seem that we have figured out the cause of something, but there are other things involved. The 'outside influence' affects both the cause and effect. It is incredibly difficult to isolate something so that nothing else interferes. 

Food is a great example. Anyone wanting to eat healthily will get millions of competing theories. It is very hard to stop eating everything else, eat just a single ingredient, then observe its effect. Then repeat with each combination of two, etc.. Each of us is different. Instead, we come up with sweeping 'cause and effect' stories that we generalise to others because it worked for us. We think. Till it doesn't. Then sorry. The biggest Confounding Variable is the story we bring with us. The prejudice we already have that needs to be unwound to see clearly.

You can be distrustful of cause and effect, and still use the stories you learn. Just add more than a sprinkle of humility. The world is complicated and random. Everything is a pattern if you want it to be. We can thank our imaginations for that.

Naissance Drug Test

Nesta stopped Bolt's Triple Triple

Drug tests can apply historically. They store samples, and so in the arms race between performance enhancement and those trying to police, time is on the side of truth. It doesn't change the result. Lance Armstrong had his seven victories 'voided', but the new winners can't retrospectively get the spoils. Usain Bolt can't call himself the 'Triple Triple' winner after Nesta Carter was found positive, so there are repercussion, but the past can't be undone. Truth only affects the time in which it is true.

History gets retrospective drug testing too. The artists, poets, musicians, and storytellers of Europe pitched the Enlightenment as a 'Renaissance'. Historian Peter Frankopan points out that it was more of a 'Naissance'. More birth than rebirth. The discovery of sea routes to the New World pivoted the Old World from its centre in the East. When Alexander went conquering, he went east. When the Mongol's extended their empire, they didn't think pushing further west was worth the effort. Western Europe had far less to do with Greece and Rome than any number of the other important empires of the east. The Silk Roads were long the arteries of civilisation while Western Europe was the cold toes.

It was convenient to pitch a passing of the torch along a line of development of ancient civilisations. To claim ownership. It enhanced performance, and pitched Colonialism as the successor to the failed Crusades. Instead of claiming the holy lands, they would take religion to foreign lands. The new civilising mission could be used as justification for any number of other motives.

As stories are reread, they are compared to other stories. Inconsistencies come to light. Questions get asked. History may be written by the victors, but the one consistent thing in history is that victors come and go. Evidence lasts a little longer.

Facts

I believe in facts. I believe there are relationships that hold the physics, and chemistry, of the universe together in the way it exist. Some of these relationships are fragile, and changing. Some are longer lasting. Permanence is a something that by definition will remain an infinite unknown. Our attempts at understanding facts, and using facts, make use of the only tools we have. Human tools. Our understanding of facts can only exist in the stories we tell ourselves to understand how those facts affect us. Something that we believe is false can still have power if other believe it is true. So false can be real. Through a process of bold assertions, mistakes, and learning, our relationship with facts evolves. When we believe A and B, and we can't believe both... we feel uneasy. Cognitive Dissonance. Sometimes we have to choose. Because we are human, we don't always have to. We can take another step in a world we will never understand. A world that is complex, ambiguous, uncertain, and beautiful. 

Facts are relationships, and so are fictions.

Buffett Buffet

Conversations, social media, blogs and banter don't go through the same rigorous editing as most professional media outlets or corporates. Your Mom likely stops correcting your grammar at some point. Maybe because you have gotten better. Maybe because she has given up. We get to relax, and if we are surrounded by close friends - we can let our guard down. At times we need this. A friend shared a wonderful article about 'holding space' for people when they are going through a tough time. Removing all the editing and looking for the thing that matters. My Dad often reminds me to listen for what people are feeling, not what they are saying. We can do that with friends, not when we are releasing 'professional' articles.

Writing professionally can be death by a thousand cuts/edits. You can go in circles as the meaning of each phrase is debated. Done badly, the voice of the author can be lost. Your voice includes all those little mishaps that give you character. Remove that, remove your style, and you remove the empathy that makes the facts worth listening to. Removing typos doesn't kill the voice though, it stops distraction. Like wearing the appropriate clothes makes what you are saying the topic of conversation rather than what you look like. Two typos that catch me out often are there/their and Buffet/Buffett. When I publish my blog, even after a spell check, and reading through it a few times I often won't see those errors. Having someone else read the blog first would be great. New eyes see our errors since we read what we mean, not what we have written. It also adds friction though. Imagine you had someone who listened to you and then corrected every line. A translator of sorts, even when you were speaking the same language as the person listening. No thanks. I will keep my mistakes (and correct them as soon as someone points them out).

Warren Buffett 'is not an all you can eat food selection' Mike Browne

When you are actually speaking to someone, you have the advantage of body language. You are reading them even as they are listening to you. You can adjust, emphasise, and correct. The way you say something also matters. An early colleague (half) jokingly told me that if you want someone to believe you say something with confidence and to two decimal places. 94.67% of statistics are made up anyway.

A big part of professional writing is fact checking. If you publish something that is wrong, it makes people start to question everything else you say. Teams of number people will go through calculations again and again. A Maker-Checker process where multiple eyes look at the same thing. In real life, most of our conversations are not fact checked. They are based on our experiences and particularly our experiences with enough emotional resonance to become stories. We will tell people if we have been mugged. We will tell people if someone has be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or any of those other things that get our blood boiling. We don't really repeat things that were fine. That were nice. That were okay. Facts can get in the way of a good story.

I don't think we would be better off if everything we said in informal settings was fact checked before we said it. I don't fact check guest posts. I put facts I believe in my posts. I am always fact checking myself, but part of the way I do that is by writing blog posts. I hope that the best way to correct errors is to make them in public. The real errors are the ones where I don't know are wrong. The danger is obviously that if the incorrect facts make good stories, they can spread fast. They can inflame. The incentives may not be there for the truth to spread.

That's when perhaps it best to follow my Dad's advice. Listen to what the writer is feeling. Allow a bull quota for the things that get our blood boiling. Then help correct errors and create a better story.

Image Source: "Hot Buffet line aboard Celebrity Equinox" by Joe Ross ; "Warren Buffett KU Visit" by Mark Hirschey