one-point connectification

Money is one of the most important inventions of mankind. Just take a moment and appreciate the craziness of being able to express a full body massage in terms of wine glasses.

Mathematically speaking, money acts as the one-point connectification of the graph of tradable pairs of goods and services. (In the same spirit as the one-point compactification of a topological space.) Once it is introduced into an economy all goods and services can be converted to each other. In other words, by definition, there is nothing more liquid than money.

a sprinkle of diversity

In my experience, even the most liberal leaning individuals do not desire absolute, uncontrolled diversity in their social lives. They want a sprinkle of controlled diversity, just like Harvard trying to maintain a certain percentage of internationals in its student body. (When Harvard campus got dominated by Jews, the administration introduced non-quantitative arbitrary aspects to its admission process.)

I remember how bodyguards of a hip jazz club in Cape Town bounced black people once there were already "too many" black people inside. If you ask to the white patrons, they will all find this behaviour disgusting and racist. But if you remove the filter, most of them will leave.

asynchronous growth cycles

Modern marriages are based on the idea of mutual promotion of personal growth and what breaks them the most is the emergence of a major asynchrony among the growth cycles of the partners.

When one partner experiences an exponential growth in a certain area, he or she falsely believes that this will go on forever. But exponential growths never continue forever. Compared to linear growths, they are more thrilling, correct, but they are also more short-lived. 

This is the reason why traditional marriages are based on vows like "I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honour you all the days of my life."

Stasis may always be around the corner. You never know.

power and youth

There are only two parameters that can increase the number of future paths lying head of you: power and youth

• Being powerful means having more financial and social capital. Empowering talented and trustworthy people with resources is the only way you can turn complex ideas into reality.
• Being young means having more time to realise your ideas and capitalise on the stochasticity of life.

This is essentially why power and youth are the most envied characteristics in the world.

ikigai intersections

Check out the following diagram. (Hat tip to Pelin Urgancilar for sharing it with me.)

For reference see this blogpost by Paul Campillo

The trouble with these sorts of ikigai illustrations is that they do not display the level of returns.

What people will pay the most lies mostly outside of what you want to do. Hence you will get rewarded less if you move to the intersection of blue and pink circles. What you can do now is probably what everyone else can do equally well as well. In other words, you need to invest in yourself to qualify for what people will pay the most. Hence your returns will decrease even further if you try to move to the intersection of all three circles. (A better label for this middle area would be "Happy & Average!")

In short, the more circles you intersect with the more sacrifices you will have to make. People stay away from the middle, not because they are lazy, but mostly because they feel the trade-offs involved with the process.

accuracy of prejudice

As an economy advances, the number of different units available in the marketplace increases. This increase in availability and complexity gives individuals more options to express themselves via their consumption patterns and thereby allows them to more accurately judge each other from their looks. In other words, as an economy advances, its participants become more inclined to be prejudiced since prejudice generating models become more efficient.

Similarly, it is not surprising that parole algorithms resulting from machine learning techniques being applied in the judicial domain tend to be severely biased. More data allows more discrimination and machines do their cold-blooded calculations with no understanding of the historical and sociological context in which the data they are fed was generated.

unsystematisability of chance encounters

Places that become renowned as (or designed from the beginning as) facilitators of chance encounters gradually lose their functionality. They get overcrowded by people who come there to meet new people. These networkers destroy the spontaneity element completely and replace chance encounters with plain encounters.

You want to experience beautiful and organic chance encounters? Just wonder around the city and keep your antennas open. Other wonderers with similar instincts and interests will inevitably cross your path.

divergence in top talent

Being a sloppy mathematician is a precondition for being a superb physicist. All the greatest ideas in physics involved huge discreet intuitive leaps. Mathematics always came later to bridge and formalise the gaps. 

Einstein doggedly went ahead with his gut feelings. It took him and his mathematician friends years to formalise his intuitional ideas about gravity. Feynman did the same thing in quantum mechanics. He went ahead with his path integrals which mathematicians have still not been able to make rigorous despite continuous attempts during the last seventy years. (Einstein and Feynman are not some random physicists. They are the best humanity could come up with in the twentieth century!)

What seems like a positive correlation in the middle talent range becomes negative at the top. Good math and physics skills go hand in hand until you reach the top echelon of each discipline. Best physicists are not mediocre but horrible mathematicians, and vice versa.

There are similar examples from other domains as well. I will provide you with two. I am sure you can come up with more.

• Good business and political skills often go hand in hand. This leads most people to mistakenly conclude that top businessmen can become top politicians and vice versa.
• Best performers on stage are timid and awkward in social contexts off stage.

hiring juniors

Hiring juniors always involve trade offs. 

• They are more loyal if they stay. (They owe so much to you for their professional growth.) But they may leave right before your investment starts paying off. In that case, you are left with a huge net negative value in your hands.
• They are more passionate. But this passion comes mostly from their inexperience.
• They are more energetic. But after a while their misdirected energy becomes a headache.
• They are cheaper. But they do everything more slowly and with more mistakes. 
• They have less ego. But this may result in their voice being drowned out in meetings.
• They are easier to manage. But they require more micro management which can become tiresome.
• They are easier to find in the market. But this is mainly because they are the small fish. (The big fish are always harder to catch.)

For these reasons, although I enjoy talent discovery tremendously, I often find myself in situations hiring expensive seniors rather than taking a risk with juniors.

real-time mentorship

Quality of your mentorship skills can only be gauged real-time.

Researchers and entrepreneurs fight on the frontiers and frontiers are by definition unique territories beset with unique problems. Therefore, you can not mentor these people in pre-packaged formats (e.g. lectures) in artificial environments (e.g. classrooms). You need to go to the battle with them, shoulder-to-shoulder.

What distinguishes the mentor from the mentee on the battle ground is the speed of problem solving. Mentor too learns alongside the mentee since the problems at the frontier are always unique and new. His only difference is that he learns faster.

Mentee who sees the mentor in action learns better since learning is essentially a mimetic process.