Rates of Growth

I've been enjoying A Map that Reflects the Territory, a collection of the best LessWrong essays from 2018. While in general the essays are thought provoking and interesting, one set of essays gave me pause: Hyperbolic Growth and related chapters on fast vs slow takeoff.

The discussion repeats tropes that are common in the rationalist and futurist community, describing how economic and technological growth have been accelerating and suggesting that they will soon increase so quickly that we will be unable to follow:

(data source, csv)

However, we have to be careful ...

Reading Live on the Margin

After a recent recommendation I read Live on the Margin, a book about following your dreams while paying for it by trading. It's mostly an introduction to short term trading, but starts out with an introduction to slacker lifestyle.

Slacking

The principle is simple: You want to follow your dreams now, not wait for retirement when you are old. You have a bit of money, so how do you make it last longer while you travel the world? First step, figuring out the burn rate: How much money you actually need to spend to do so. Try ...

Reading The Little Book That Still Beats the Market

This short book elaborates on Graham's principle of value investing and puts it into a concrete form, boiling it all the way down to a simple formula you can use for investing: Buy above average companies at below average prizes.

To be more specific, pick a cut off in market capitalization (say 50 million), then rank the remaining stocks based on p/e ratio and return on assets/capital. Buy those that are best when adding both ranks. Gradually phase these portfolio in in groups of a few stocks, then update whenever a stock has been held for one year. In ...

Reading The Intelligent Investor

My quest of figuring out how to sensible invest my money continues with The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Regarded as a fundamental work by many, I decided I should read it sooner than later.

It presents Graham's philosophy of value investing, along with comments from a modern point of view. It became clear very quickly that picking stocks according to these principles is actually quite a bit of work, more than I'm willing to do. Nevertheless, there are a few important principles that hold true for any kind of investment activity.

Portfolio Policy: The Defensive Investor

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Reading Fooled by Randomness

To make more of the books I've read and remember them better, I've started to keep notes while reading. I mostly follow the procedure outlined on Farnam Street, but realized that realized that publicly posting my notes forces me to put a bit more thought into them. So here we go!

The main point of the book is that we humans are incredibly bad at dealing with probability, our only hope is to acknowledge our weakness and work around it. According to Taleb, the core generator of these ideas:

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, ...