Your Daily Tao

Today, years away from the Renaissance, we’re still attached to the myth of lone inventors. We do recognize collaboration and partnerships, but we often fall back on tales of lone innovators as heroic figures for reasons of convenience. We insist on isolating credit and dismissing the importance of others. Patent law, by design, credits one or a handful of individuals, assuming not only that ideas are unique and separable, which is dubious, but that individual names can be given legal ownership of ideas. Patents, as currently applied in the U.S., do solve problems, but they create just as many. They distort popular understanding of how inventions happen, as well as which innovations are most valuable to the world. Guy Kawasaki, author of Rules for Revolutionaries and former Apple fellow, argues for demystifying lone invention. In his experience, great innovations, and businesses, are born when two or more creators work together to make things happen. He recommends: Find a few soulmates. History loves the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (lightbulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). History is wrong. Successful companies are started, and made successful by at least two, and usually more, soulmates. After the fact one person may come to be recognized as “the innovator,” but it always takes a team of good people to make any venture work .  Grand partnerships are easy to find: John Lennon and Paul McCartney, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Its easy to attribute innovation to individuals, but most often, great innovations usually come from a team of people. Falling back on the “solo genius” takes away from the real process of how we can actually engineer innovation. It is more about finding the right team, environment and timing.

Rogers identifies five factors that define how quickly innovations spread; they belong in every innovator’s playbook. Roughly summarized and loosely interpreted, they include: Relative advantage . What value does the new thing have compared to the old? This is perceived advantage, determined by the potential consumer of the innovation, not its makers. This makes it possible for a valueless innovation — from the creator’s perspective — to gain acceptance, while more valuable ones do not. Perceived advantage is built on factors that include economics, prestige, convenience, fashion, and satisfaction. Compatibility . How much effort is required to transition from the current thing to the innovation? If this cost is greater than the relative advantage, most people won’t try the innovation. These costs include people’s value systems, finances, habits, or personal beliefs. Rogers describes a Peruvian village that rejected the innovation of boiling water because of cultural beliefs that hot foods were only for sick people. You could argue all you wanted about the great benefits of boiling water, but if a religious or cultural belief forbids it, you’re wasting your breath. Technological compatibility is only part of what makes an innovation spread: the innovation has to be compatible with habits, beliefs, values, and lifestyles. Complexity . How much learning is required to apply the innovation? If a box of free, high-quality, infinite battery-life cell phones (and matching solar-powered cell towers) mysteriously appeared in 9th-century England, usage would stay at 0%, as the innovation requires a jump in complexity that would terrify people (“They’re witches’ eggs — burn them!”). The smaller the perceived conceptual gap, the higher the rate of acceptance. Trialability . How easy is it to try the innovation? Teabags were first used as giveaways so people could sample tea without buying large tins, radically improving the trialability of brewed tea. Samples, giveaways, and demonstrations are centuries-old techniques for making it risk-free to try new ideas. This is why the GAP lets you try on clothes, and the Honda dealership gives anyone with a pulse a test-drive. The easier it is to try, the faster innovations diffuse. Observability . How visible are the results of the innovation? The more visible the perceived advantage, the faster the rate of adoption, especially within social groups. Fashion fads are a great example of highly observable innovations that have little value beyond their observability. Advertising fakes observability, as many ads show people using a product, say, drinking a new brand of beer, with all kinds of wonderful things happening. Many technologies have limited observability, say, software device drivers, compared to physical products like mobile phones and trendy handbags, which people use socially.

The best ideas don’t always win. Rather, it is a mix of these 5 factors, that enable an innovation to be a lasting one. Relative advantage, Compatibility, Complexity, Trialability and Observability,

Even the tale of Newton’s apple owes its mythic status to the journalists of the day. Voltaire and other popular 18th-century writers spread the story in their essays and letters. An eager public, happy to hear the ancient notion of ideas as magic, endorsed and embellished the story (e.g., the apple’s trajectory moved over time, from being observed in the distance to landing at his feet to eventually striking Newton’s head in a telling by Disraeli [7] decades later). While it is true that by dramatizing Newton’s work, Voltaire helped popularize Newton’s ideas, two centuries later, little of Newton’s process is remembered: myths always serve promotion more than education. Anyone wishing to innovate must seek better sources and can easily start by examining the history of any idea.

How narratives sell. Embellishing a story to promote a concept might make it more popular, but what it does also takes away from the process, and probably less glamorous parts of innovation. We tend to be attracted to stories of epiphanies, where sudden inspiration strikes. That is why the apple falling on Newton’s head, hence leading to his inspiration for the theory of gravity as an epiphany. While it might be a good story, it doesn’t actually help us break down the process of innovation and creation so we can replicate it.

The whole edifice of modern financial theory is, as described earlier, founded on a few simplifying assumptions. It presumes that homo economicus is rational and self-interested. Wrong, suggests the experience of the irrational, mob-psychology bubble and burst of the 1990s. A further assumption: that price variations follow the bell curve. Wrong, suggests the by-now widely accepted research of me and many others since the 1960s. And now the next assumption wobbles: that price variations are what statisticians call i.i.d., independently and identically distributed—like the coin game with each toss unaffected by the last. Evidence for short-term dependence has already been mounting. And now comes the increasingly accepted but still confusing evidence of long-term dependence. Some economists, when thinking about long memory, are concerned that it undercuts the Efficient Market Hypothesis that prices fully reflect all relevant information; that the random walk is the best metaphor to describe such markets; and that you cannot beat such an unpredictable market. Well, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is no more than that, a hypothesis. Many a grand theory has died under the onslaught of real data.

Under the efficient markets hypothesis, it is assumed that stock prices in the market follow a “random walk”, where prices today are independent of prices of yesterday. Mandelbrot’s research of fractal dynamics in stock market prices has indicated evidence of long-term dependence in the markets, where prices of a stock from many years back can still impact and influence its prices today.

How can we use it? I have no clue myself or I’ll be dedicating my full awake time towards gaming the markets. But what we can take away, from a broader perspective, is that the same statistical models and tools we use to calculate risk and safety (that we learned in business school) cannot be taken to be foolproof.

All look the same. A month looks like a day, one set of days like another. In fact, at a first approximation, you could not readily tell without the labels which line was which. That clicks with something else. Having acquired an interest in financial markets after my move to New York, I started chatting with the Wall Street pros. There is something funny, one told me: In the newspaper, all price charts look alike. Sure, some go up; some down. But daily, monthly, annually—there is no big difference in the overall look of it. Strip off the dates and price markers, and you could not tell which was which. They were all equally wiggly. “Wiggly” is hardly a scientific term—and until I developed fractal geometry years later, there was no good way to quantify so vague a notion as wiggly. But that is exactly what we can now see in the cotton data: a fractal pattern. Here, the fractal scaling up and down is not being done to a shape—the florets of a broccoli or the triangles of a Sierpinski gasket. Rather, it is being applied to a different sort of pattern, the way prices vary. The very heart of finance is fractal.

The essence of this book is about Mandelbrot’s work with fractals and how it is used in the study of financial markets. A simple explanation of what fractals are is patterns that are self-similar at various scales. In the context of financial markets, a daily, weekly and yearly price chart would be indistinguishable to each other and will display the same chracteristics of swings, ups and downs.

How does that help us? Fractals are simply another methodology of understanding and explaining the characteristics of financial markets. I’ll be sharing more passages from his book over the next few days.

Once you drop the assumption of homogeneity, new and complicated things happen in your mathematical models of the market. For instance, assume just two types of investors, instead of one: fundamentalists who believe that each stock or currency has its own, intrinsic value and will eventually sell for that value, and chartists who ignore the fundamentals and only watch the price trends so they can jump on and off bandwagons. In computer simulations by economists Paul De Grauwe and Marianna Grimaldi at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, the two groups start interacting in unexpected ways, and price bubbles and crashes arise, spontaneously. The market switches from a well-behaved “linear” system in which one factor adds predictably to the next, to a chaotic “non-linear” system in which factors interact and yield the unanticipated. And that is with just two classes of investors. How much more complicated and volatile is the real market, with almost as many classes as individuals?

Understanding the intrinsic value of a company/business that is traded might not lend much help in predicting its stock price. In this passage, even simulations of 2 different classes of investors, 1 that focuses on fundamentals and 1 that focuses on pure technical (charts) can lead to unpredictable swings in the stock price as they impact each other.

What more in the today’s world, where not only do we have various classes of investors, but social movements and online communities (as is the case of GameStop and Reddit). As the number of actors influencing the prices of stocks increase, there is bound to be increased unpredictability of stocks.

The bones in the human face don’t stop growing in our 20s, unlike other bones in the body. They can expand and remodel into our 70s, and likely beyond. Which means we can influence the size and shape of our mouths and improve our ability to breathe at virtually any age. To do this, don’t follow the diet advice of eating what our great-grandmothers ate. Too much of that stuff was already soft and overly processed. Your diet should consist of the rougher, rawer, and heartier foods our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers ate. The kinds of foods that required an hour or two a day of hard chewing. And in the meantime, lips together, teeth slightly touching, and tongue on the roof of the mouth.

The above summarizes the key message of the book. Breath slowly, 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out. Our jaws impact the quality of our breathing, and we should eat raw and tougher foods to ensure that the bones in our face and jaw stay strong. And apparently, keeping your tongue on the roof of your mouth may actually help reshape your jawline and help you breath and sleep better without snoring.

In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone.

Key takeaway, to slow down your breathing and intentionally take in less oxygen when exercising to grow your endurance. You might feel like shit doing it, but it is supposed to lead to long-term benefits for your endurance and health, while also elevating the positive impact of your exercise. Also, in this book, it mentions that even if we take in slow breaths (i.e every 5-6 seconds), we still get more than enough oxygen for our needs.

And here we are. Ninety percent of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses. Forty-five percent of adults snore occasionally, and a quarter of the population snores constantly. Twenty-five percent of American adults over 30 choke on themselves because of sleep apnea; and an estimated 80 percent of moderate or severe cases are undiagnosed. Meanwhile, the majority of the population suffers from some form of breathing difficulty or resistance.

Following up from the previous post. This books talks about how a modern diet (where we have moved from chewing hard stuff like nuts and meats towards soft foods like grains, porridges and vegetables) have impacted the development of the size of our jaws. This has thus led to more breathing problems for us. Its really interesting how traits that have helped humans in their evolution (such as the size of our heads and vocal ability) + trends in diet and environment have caused many of the health problems we have (such as asthma) in the modern world.

Evolution doesn’t always mean progress, Evans told me. It means change. And life can change for better or worse. Today, the human body is changing in ways that have nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest.” Instead, we’re adopting and passing down traits that are detrimental to our health. This concept, called dysevolution, was made popular by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman, and it explains why our backs ache, feet hurt, and bones are growing more brittle. Dysevolution also helps explain why we’re breathing so poorly. To understand how this all happened, and why, Evans told me, we need to go back in time. Way back. To before Homo sapiens were even sapiens. Strangely, sadly, the same adaptations that would allow our ancestors to outwit, outmaneuver, and outlive other animals—a mastery of fire and processing food, an enormous brain, and the ability to communicate in a vast range of sounds—would obstruct our mouths and throats and make it much harder for us to breathe. This recessed growth would, much later, make us prone to choke on our own bodies when we slept: to snore.* None of this mattered to the early humans, of course. For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors would use their wildly developed heads to breathe just fine. Armed with a nose, a voice, and a supersized brain, humans took over the world.

In the world that we live in today, evolution is no longer that of survival of the fittest. Just like how pets that are “cuter” get to pass on their traits, many of the traits that might affect our health are also passed down. In this book, Nestor first talks about how evolution, and our traits that allowed us to out-survive and outdo other animals also cause us trouble in our modern bodies.