In this episode, Chris and Nico are looking at “Why spiritual people hate the word success, and business people hate spirituality”.

Chris had an epiphany that we humans are mostly following scripts that other people have written.

There is a red flag: “Is there a human behind this?” can be used as a detection device. “Who is going to profit from me believing this?”

Then again we look at how this relates to the power of nonsense.

Remember: Models (of the world) are never true or false; they are simply more or less useful / functional.

Chris cites the “Green lumber fallacy” (see below).

It’s not necessarily a problem to have or act on false assumptions. It may be smarter to assume that your model is wrong anyway; it might still be functional.

Mentioned in this episode:

– Book excerpt from “Choose yourself!” by James Altucher ($ 1.23 for Kindle version)

– Green lumber fallacy quote from Antifragile by Nassim Taleb:

“In one of the rare noncharlatanic books in finance, descriptively called What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, the protagonist makes a big discovery. He remarks that a fellow called Joe Siegel, the most active trader in a commodity called “green lumber” actually thought that it was lumber painted green (rather than freshly cut lumber, called green because it had not been dried). And he made a living, even a fortune trading the stuff! Meanwhile the narrator was into theories of what caused the price of commodities to move and went bust.

The fact is that predicting the orderflow in lumber and the price dynamics narrative had little to do with these details —not the same ting. Floor traders are selected in the most nonnarrative manner, just by evolution in the sense that nice arguments don’t make much difference.”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti (on Wikipedia)

– Krishnamurti’s dissolution speech “Truth is a pathless land” (text version)

– Dr. Clare W. Graves (Wikipedia / the book “The never ending quest“)
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