johandp
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Stop confusing clever with lucky
Posted in crosspost on 28/08/2013
Here is an excerpt from a post on my other blog, J delta rho where I decry the all too common practice of assuming people who made money in the stock market were somehow remarkable, rather than just extremely lucky.
I get very annoyed when I see idiotic journalism, such as this article (admittedly Business Insider does not exactly maintain high standards of journalism, but in this case they just copied CNBC). To recap: one 22-year old kid put all his savings into Tesla shares (and later options on Tesla shares) and today has made quite a hefty profit. But when his friends told him he was crazy, they were right.
read more here.
Christian Prayer Center scam
Posted in Christianity, thoughts on 14/08/2013
Sometimes you find things on the internet that fill you with a righteous rage. So it was when I friend send me the link to Christian Prayer Center accompanied by a sad smiley face. The site was not in good taste, but it seemed benign on the surface. Closer inspection revealed a scam that’s a mockery of Christianity. My friend’s instincts were spot-on. No prayers are made or answered at Christian Prayer Center.
Let’s start with most damning charge that can be laid. They charge for prayer. Almost as if it were like buying detergent. A quick Google revealed that others had come across this site before and had detailed the process. You actually have to submit prayer request before being told you have to pay for it. This is disgusting.
They sell an offensive book that suggests you can pray so that your prayer will always be answered. Here is the blurb:
Have you ever wondered why God answers some prayers faster than others?
Does it matter how specific we are in asking for what we need?
What can we do to guarantee that our prayers will be answered every time?
If want to learn more about how to harness the fantastic power of prayer, I highly recommend “Miracles Through Prayer” by Pastor Randolph McFinn.
This enlightening guide details the five principles of effective prayer. Using real-world examples and easy-to-follow instructions, it’s the perfect resource for both the loosely religious and the highly devout. It answers questions many of us have about how prayer works, how God responds to our requests, and how to always make sure our prayers get answered.
This book is available for a limited time through the Christian Prayer Center for 20% off the cover price plus FREE shipping. Order your copy today and unlock the full potential of prayer.
What I find interesting about scams like this is how subtle they are. There is a way to make sure your prayers are always answered: pray for God’s will to be done (I suppose there is room for debate about this). But this is not what they mean. They mean that if you prayer for, say, financial success, then this is what you will get. The testimonials on the website are mostly of the following nature:
“When I got in from work this evening, I received a letter from IRS: Certificate of Release of Federal Tax Lien. The letter stated that over 10,000 dollars of back taxes has been satisfied. Thank you for all your prayers and I look forward to successfully sharing the job I will be landing next Tuesday.” -Joyce C.
This is a “prosperity gospel”: the idea that following God leads to success in (material) life (it doesn’t! It leads to success in your spiritual life.) Perhaps the most disingenuous part of the blurb, for me at least, was this: “it’s the perfect resource for both the loosely religious and the highly devout.” It is of course not true that prayer is more effective for the “highly devout” (although you can argue their prayers tend to be more in-line with God’s will). What is disingenuous about this statement is that it implies its perfectly OK to be ‘loosely religious’, that God is perfectly fine with people bending his arm for favours and doesn’t care at all about the lives they lead.
I am not against books that teach people how to pray. I am not against people giving and receiving prayer requests. These are good things. But prayer is about talking to God, not getting things from him. And prayer is not a game of numbers. It doesn’t matter how many people pray for you. And it certainly doesn’t help to pay them. It is sad that there are people that will exploit our basic human need to connect with the divine.
I am posting this in the hope that it will help prevent a few gullible souls from falling prey to these prayer-thieves. In the meantime I will send off a little prayer for these charlatans: I do not pray that they may receive their just desserts; rather, that they may feel, truly feel, the guilt that comes with true repentance and that they will be forced themselves to pray, to the God they have abused, for forgiveness.
Mental arithmetic: a useless skill
Posted in thoughts on 11/08/2013
How important is it to be able to do mental calculations? That’s in your head. I know that there are people that can work out crazy things like 12373 in their heads, but I am not one of those people. Why do companies still ask for candidates to perform mental calculations in job interviews or assessments?
I am a mathematician (that is, I have a masters degree in mathematics) and non-mathematicians often expect that I should be able to add up or divide the bill when we are in a restaurant. Then I need to explain that, actually, mathematics is not about numbers (I hardly ever see actual concrete numbers) and that I was probably going to make a mistake.
I get fluttered and nervous when I have to do mental arithmetic, particularly if other people are waiting for the answer. (I find dividing be three, or any other odd number, especially hard). The more real maths I have done, the more I have lost my ability to do calculations in my head. I consider concepts far more important. We have calculators and computers for a reason. I like to leave the calculations to those devices.
I have a distinct bias in expressing the above opinion, exactly because I am not good at mental calculations. I want to justify my inability to do such seemingly simple things. I want to prove that it is not important, that my other skills are far more valuable, that spending my time improving my mental calculation skills would be wasteful. Does it matter that my mental arithmetic is poor? Will I ever find myself in a (non-contrived) situation where it is actually important?
I was recently asked to do a simple calculation at a job interview and I could not get the right answer at first (in fact, I was so obviously wrong, that my interviewers may have doubted my credentials). Embarrassed, I got the correct answer later, when my mind had calmed down.
I failed a McKinsey entrance test which relied on being able to make mental approximations to a number of arithmetic problems in a very limited amount of time. Even though I understood most of the concepts involved, I could not perform these mental calculations at the required speed. I could have practiced such calculations for a month or two (or more) beforehand and (probably) have passed, but why? Hypothetically, some client might ask what the profit would be if x and y had certain values, but if the answer were important it would need to be arrived it far more elaborately and placed in some important document. In any case, I don’t particularly mind not having quick answers to such questions. I’d rather give you a thoroughly considered answer.
To me, mental calculations are a party-trick. It’s worthless unless you understand why you’re making the calculations and for any “important” work you’re going to be dealing with excel or computer models or in any case. I would rather spend my time improving my understanding of the concepts and how to use the computers that will do the number-crunching for me. In an age where computing power is cheap, but creativity paramount, this seems the right strategy.
Public grief
I was walking around a little dam near my home and I saw that some new benches had been constructed in honour of deceased grandparents. Having recently lost one of my grandparents and not having had the urge to construct a bench for them, I wondered why one would do so. Why do we build monuments to honour the dead? It isn’t for the dead. It’s for ourselves, of course, but it’s also for others.
Here are some possible reasons (some are positive, some are negative)
- We want to assuage our guilt (this one is a bit cynical, I know)
- We want people to know we cared (about our dead loved one) – self-gratification
- We want to spread the deceased’s ideals (think about hospitals, charities, trusts, erected in honour of certain people)
- We want them to become important to others – we impose the memory of this person on other people and with every person that is touched by it or just notices it, our loved one gains importance, an importance we feel is deserved
- We want their death to have meaning, to make some kind of difference
- We want to honour their last wishes (perhaps they wanted to have bench erected in their memory)
- We inform people they should appreciate their loved ones while they still can – we remind them of the inevitability and finality of death.
- We want to say something about the manner of their death, which should never be repeated (think of the holocaust and 9/11)
- It is not enough to feel our grief. We feel we need to do something with it, we need to act, we need to give it an outward expression. It is perhaps only a by-product of this that the grief becomes public and shared in some measure with the world.
One cannot walk past a bench or a monument dedicated to someone no longer living and not be moved in some way. I wonder if we’re more willing to listen to the dead than the living. We listen when it’s too late, when there is the most to regret and we realise what we’ve taken for granted. The living are less interesting because they can still fail us and there are still ample opportunities to listen, to make right. We build monuments to the dead, because we wish to hear them speak once more. We give them a stone substitute for a voice and we can’t help but listen.
A little plaque on a park bench is your voice now touching strangers who sit and listen to the cold letters they can’t help but listen to the dead
Statistical intuition fails
Posted in crosspost on 31/07/2013
Has your intuition ever failed you? Mine sometimes has (and I call myself a mathematician). In this post from my blog J delta rho I relate one such case and what it means for traders.
I am ashamed to say that my statistical intuition has failed me. I was doing some brainteasers and came across this one here :
In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
read more here.
Old habits wait for you
Posted in thoughts on 28/07/2013
People sometimes (in movies, for instance) go away for a time and come back completely changed. I think this is probably the exception rather than the norm. People learn to behave (I am theorising) in a certain way in particular surroundings and these behaviours are sticky – once learnt they are hard to unlearn, even with a long period of time spent elsewhere. You have behaviour-memory as it were.
I recently moved in with my parents after nearly two years abroad. I thought that in that time I had grown up and become more mature. But I soon found that, being in my parents’ house again, I quickly took to doing things the same way I had done them before, as if two years had not even passed. Along with the old rhythm came old habits and old patterns of behaviour. I found myself getting annoyed at the same little things, losing my temper for the same reasons, acting about as maturely as when I had set off. It seems that I will actually have to do the hard work and consciously change my habits.
Perhaps this behaviour-memory is why people report feeling like children again when they go back to their parents. It’s not just that their parents treat them like children. It’s that they also, not fully consciously, act like children, as if they had never really left.
I think the most I gained from my time abroad was the desire to be more mature. Actually being more mature will require breaking my habits.
When Madiba dies
Mandela’s birthday is coming up on Thursday and people are being asked to donate their time to help others. Mandela is still in ill-health, and it seems his death may be announced at any moment, despite claims that he is recovering. With the world waiting for Madiba’s death, some here in the Netherlands have asked me what would happen then. Some (white) people seem to think that Mandela being alive is the only thing stopping the blacks from forcibly disowning or killing the whites in South Africa. This is nonsense of course.
Here is what I think will happen:
The entire country will mourn. Blacks, whites, coloureds, Indians, Chinese, everyone, will mourn. We will be one race: black with mourning. For a very long time we will be a country in despair. Our GDP may take an appreciable hit.
But we will not erupt in chaos. We will be united in our morning, as we are united in our admiration for this great man. We will come together as we have not come together since 1994 because to do otherwise would dishonour the memory of this man. Mandela may die, but his ideals will outlive him. They will but gather strength from his death.
It will feel as if the entire country is attempting to attend his funeral (because the entire country will attempt to attend his funeral, or at least get in the vicinity). There will be tears and wails. There will be television broadcasts. Condolences will stream in from across the globe.
Mandela will be elevated to something like Sainthood. No bad thing uttered of him will be thought true. This I find a pity. For Mandela is a human being who has made mistakes. He is an example for us all, but we need to recognise his humanity. In time history will remember him as a man with a story that started long before his release from prison.
Some (read: the ANC and the Mandela family) will try to use his memory for their personal gain. I am not worried about them. They are but bit players in the grand story of the new South Africa that started with the first step Mandela took out of the Victor Verster Prison in 1990. They are overshadowed by greater ideals, by the larger strides that South Africa has made and will continue to make in spite of them. Mandela is not for the Mandelas. He is a symbol to the whole world. He will be a symbol long after he dies and long after bickering politicians and grandchildren are forgotten.
When our mourning has ceased, there will be no great announcement. There will not be a massacre or a festival. We will simply continue building our imperfect but ever hopeful country.
A closed-minded Card
Posted in Christianity, news, thoughts on 12/07/2013
There has been a lot of controversy around the upcoming movie adaptation of the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Card is a vocal critic of gay marriage and a member of the conservative Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints – he is a Mormon. There has been a campaign to boycott the movie because it would help fund Scott Card and indirectly his anti-gay campaigns. The very liberal Huffington Post has expressed somewhat mild views on this topic here and I want to give mine.
My initial reaction to this was just to leave the man to his opinions. He has the right to express them and to campaign for them. Does it really matter if a good work of fiction was produced by a mind that differed with you in some important aspect? Does that suddenly negate the value of the work? If Scott Card had been silent or at least less public about his opinions you would have been none the wiser. You don’t need to like a writer (or an actor for that matter) to appreciate their work and you certainly don’t need to agree with them.
People seem unable to accept that someone with such conservative views can produce such universally accepted works of art. This is a fallacy of course. Just because you have conservative views does not mean you lack imagination. It also does not mean that you are closed-minded. Being open-minded is about a willingness to listen; it is not about which opinion you happen to hold. There are many closed-minded people on the side of gay rights and many open-minded people who oppose it. I cannot speak for Mr Card, however.
That said, even I, as a somewhat conservative Christian, would feel uncomfortable supporting this campaign which produces adverts such as this one. I would still, however, defend the right of this organisation to exist and to make these advertisements. I voiced my views on gay marriage in this post (in a nutshell: I think it should be made legal independently of Biblical views on the matter).
If you want to boycott the movie feel free to do so. I, however, will watch the movie (and I plan to read the book) because I respect Mr Card’s ability as a writer. He can make money from his work because it is good. What he does with that money is his concern and I shall oppose it by other means.
When no one should decide
I related in a previous post why I thought that abortion should be made legal. My contention was that the government should not be making the decisions. I thought that people would be able to make far better decisions for themselves. Here, however, is a case that defies that logic.
Here we have an 11-year-old girl raped by her mother’s boyfriend with her mother’s knowledge, who is now pregnant in a country that does not allow abortions. The girl is too young and too traumatised to make her own decisions. The government has its own dogmatic stance and does not seem to care for the very real health risks this girl will face. The mother has shown herself to be unworthy of caring for mould, much less a child, and so should have no say. There is a grandmother, but allowing this decision to be taken unilaterally by her could still leave the girl scarred for life (having your child killed on your grandmother’s order can be emotionally debilitating, probably). What if there were no grandmother?
No one is fit to decide. And yet a decision needs to be made. Perhaps a special committee can decide independently of the government (like a special court for deciding what needs to be done). This committee could take into account the views and beliefs of the girl, the relatives of the girl, and the medical risks to both the girl and her unborn. This is, I think, the least horrible of the options. But it is far from desirable.
It’s a situation to break your heart.
Meditations of Lambchop 