By George Monbiot (The Guardian UK) The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin.
Larry Nocella writes: Where is Moronia? You won’t find it on any map, in the same way you won’t find Funkytown, The Nation of Islam, or The State of Confusion in any atlas. Though it sounds like a physical place, Moronia isn’t defined by a landmass covered with invisible lines that tempt humans to kill those living on the opposite side of those lines.
As you probably have figured out (if you haven’t, you may be a citizen!) Moronia is The Nation of Morons. They can live anyplace on the geographical globe (though they apparently tend to coagulate in Midland, Texas.) In the space defined by mind, they are all in one place: jammed up their own asses.
from Obama Should Immediately Appoint an Ambassador to Moronia by Larry Nocella.
We’re back again after an unrecoverable crash due to an intractable out-of-memory error caused by a defective RSS feed and I had to take it down. I am getting it back together again, but the first 30 or so messages are gone. I’ll restore the best of them.
