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The ability to sit quietly and patiently while everyone else is acting is not a passive virtue — it is the hardest-won competitive advantage in investing. Most of the damage investors do to themselves comes from the compulsion to do something when the right action is nothing.

Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (2011)
20h ago

Practical quality beats theoretical quality every time. In theory, a human engineer with infinite time and focus might produce better code than an AI agent. In practice, humans lose context over days, have decaying attention spans on hard-but-tedious problems, and skip benchmarks they know they should run. AI agents maintain consistent focus, run every test, and can work on problems continuously for days or weeks.

1d ago

Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely a lack of information — it's that we don't want to believe what the information is telling us.

1d ago

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that isn't merely stated but is structurally enforced — meaning your capital, your clients, and your own psychology are all aligned so that you literally cannot sell at the wrong time.

2d ago

The risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks is not the chief hazard for the thoughtful, enterprising investor — his chief hazard is the adoption of unsound principles or inapplicable methods under conditions of excitement and stress.

3d ago

I would describe complex systems as multivariable nonlinear systems. And multivariable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time, and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way—the weather, stock markets, all these things. There are consequences that can be first, second, or third-order. You can't just think with a linear model or just think about one variable because things can go way off the path. You need to be aware that if you make a change here, it could change something here, which could change something there, and it has to be the whole system.

6d ago

Most people think of risk as the probability of losing money. But the real risk is behaving in a way today that prevents you from being in the game tomorrow. Permanent impairment of capital is far less common than permanent impairment of judgment under pressure.

6d ago

The map required the AI to make judgement calls about hundreds of little choices, and it just made them, without me understanding the choices or having a chance to weigh in. In many ways, it is miraculous (I can always ask for edits at the end) on the other, it turns AI into the ultimate black box.

1w ago

The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things you can have. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It's bad to have an opinion you're proud of if you can't state the other side better than your opponents.

1w ago

The truth is that we never know for certain about anything. The degree of assurance we feel about any proposition is not a measure of its truth, but a measure of our familiarity with the evidence bearing on it.

1w ago

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Most people don't recognize the institutional imperative at work — the tendency of organizations to mindlessly imitate whatever peers are doing, regardless of whether it makes sense.

1w ago

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The dangerous investor is not the one who doesn't know what will happen, but the one who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

1w ago

We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.

1w ago

He shares lessons from building Zynga, missing the opportunity behind social networking before Facebook took off, navigating platform risk during Zynga's explosive growth, and rebuilding his confidence after major failures.

1w ago

The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. But what most people miss is that patience isn't passive — it requires the active courage to hold while everything around you screams sell.

1w ago

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

2w ago

Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where do we not want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to guarantee failure—then avoid it.

2w ago

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. Unconventional behavior is the only road to superior investment results, but it isn't for everyone. Uncomfortably idiosyncratic positions can result in short-term performance that is worse than the market or peers.

2w ago

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

2w ago

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. The long-term compounder who does nothing dramatic usually beats the person executing a brilliant short-term strategy.

2w ago

The tolerance for failure is just so much higher. I just met so many people who just burned through tens of millions of dollars on what seemed a trash idea, and it was a trash idea! And then it was like, 'Okay, great, well now I'm going to do the other thing.' And then the next thing is also a trash idea. Great, they get to put $100 million into that other trash thing. And the third thing is amazing, and then it's a multi-billion-dollar company.

2w ago

We accept the verdict of the past until the need of the present voices a demand for change; and even then we rarely have the courage to deny that the past was right, we merely claim that it was right for another age.

2w ago

The best chance of success is to buy something that is so good that even a fool can run it. Because sooner or later, a fool will.

2w ago

The best thing for your own mind is to be exposed relentlessly to smart people who disagree with you.

2w ago

The biggest investing errors come not from companies that fail, but from companies that succeed in ways you didn't anticipate. You prepare for the future by studying how the past was different from what people expected.

3w ago

The big difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people say no to almost everything.

3w ago
longreads.com
The Wrong Stalker

They didn't mention that they hadn't checked the authenticity of the emails from Shawn provided by Bridget. They were relying solely on the screenshots. And there is no evidence that they had looked into Bridget's past.

3w ago

The sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

3w ago

The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating trends, but by asking what must be true about the future, and then working backward. Most people get this backwards—they assume the future will be like the past, just more so.

3w ago

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. If you're unwilling to make mistakes, you're unwilling to try anything new, and you'll never learn.

3w ago

The big question about artificial intelligence is not whether machines can think, but whether humans will stop thinking and let the machines do it for them.

4w ago

Engineers are becoming "compute allocators" rather than code writers. When Claude can run for eight hours on a single task, you're really deciding how to spend $500 of compute. The critical skill is no longer writing code; it's deciding what's worth building, defining the boundaries of what you need to know, and staying in sync with the agent throughout the process.

4w ago

The best thing you can do is compound money at high rates of return for a long time. That's the game. Most people don't understand that the biggest returns come from sitting, not trading.

4w ago
noahpinion.blog
Dating advice for men

A lot of men — maybe even most men — get emotionally attached to our sex partners. There are well-known natural mechanisms for this. For those guys, going through one woman after another, again and again, for years and years, is just making and breaking those attachments again and again. That's not fun, that's self-punishment.

4w ago

The best investment is in the business that compounds the fastest while requiring the least capital to do so. Most people focus on the numerator and ignore the denominator.

4w ago

The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.

4w ago

Perhaps the most important advantage of "useless" knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative habit of mind. There is in the world too much readiness, not only for action without adequate previous reflection, but also for some sort of action on occasions on which wisdom would counsel inaction… For my part, I think action is best when it emerges from a profound apprehension of the universe and human destiny, not from some wildly passionate impulse of romantic but disproportioned self-assertion.

4w ago

The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding what's actually changing and what isn't.

4w ago

The best way to get smart is to try to be a little smarter than you were the day before. But the way to get rich is to try to be a little richer than you were the day before.

4w ago

I assumed that I was voting for the songwriters who would be included in the list. But I now see that the experts consulted by the Times only got to make nominations. The final 30 names were chosen by six New York Times music critics. There never was a real vote.

1mo ago

The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding incentive structures and what they reward. Most people get this backwards.

1mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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