“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Vladimir Lenin
I have found the past weeks to be unsettling. My personal reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and all the concomitant saber rattling, has included bouts of anxiety, sadness, anger, and confusion. My investment into reading various stoic letters and books, including The Daily Stoic, has felt somewhat helpful. Still, I find myself feeling “pulled” into states of despair and guilt; By what gift of Lady Fortuna do we find ourselves experiencing tragedy through the windows of Twitter, CNN, and FaceBook? I find myself wondering if the ethical choice, today, is to jump on a plane, arrive in Poland or Moldova, and offer an additional pair of hands for any task.
I have not followed that instinct. I am typing this blogpost from my comfortable home office in State College, Pennsylvania. My kids will sleep safely in their beds; Becca and I will follow our routine tomorrow. It would be nice to think we “earned” that opportunity. But we didn’t.
My daily routine includes tinkering with projects I am building on my computer, developing business ideas, getting exercise, reading, and learning (or relearning) some mathematics. On this final point, I started engaging with lessons to attempt to ensure that I can confidently help Camilla and Holger with their homework (at least through primary school.) I was surprised to discover enjoyment in these lessons. I “touched” Bernoulli and binomial distributions, Pascal’s Triangle, and simple integration in high school; I didn’t find the topics interesting at the time. Talking with Becca about this earlier, she offered that a key issue for teachers is coping with a student’s “readiness” for learning.
I wrote this blogpost last year which included some intellectual wrestling I was engaged in around the topic of modeling health care claims for populations. Two questions included whether the best model involved applying parameters to different sub-groups of a population and, secondly, what the best probability density function should “look like” (i.e. Gaussian, log-normal, etc.) I remain stuck in this rabbit hole, and consequently found my way to Nassim Taleb’s writings, including essays (Black Swan, Anti-Fragile, Fooled by Randomness, and Bed of Procrustes), various MooCs, and, over the past few weeks, a technical book (that generally runs over my head): Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails. Among ideas I find interesting is the existence of an asymptote for the probability distribution of random variables and rates of convergence.
The extent to which (countless) individuals like Taleb, Karl Popper, David Hume, Louis Bachelier, and Amos Tversky change entire frameworks of thinking based upon their inquiry into certain questions is interesting. Whether their contributions were broad (e.g. Hume’s problem of induction) or narrow (e.g. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory / the asymmetric value of perceived gain and loss) these individuals (likely) changed the course of history. At the root of their contributions was, in a sense, a decision to wrestle with consequential issues. We are all better off as a result of the priorities chosen; In other words, society progressed based on the questions they asked.
Well, maybe the impact of these ideas and contributions feels a bit removed from “reality on the ground” today in Kharkiv.
I recognize this blogpost is a bit disjointed. In that spirit, here is another anecdote:
I had the opportunity fifteen years ago to purchase shares of our local business, The Hartman Group. I recall thinking about the stakeholder groups I served as an employee, including colleagues, clients, insurers, vendors, and the shareholder group; I came to a conclusion that I should behave as though the shareholder group was “senior amongst equals.” I was struggling with how to adjust my thinking as I joined the shareholder group, and shared some questions with my future partner, Tom. As I suspected he would, Tom listened carefully to me and responded by sharing his own views. His feedback was that my views were overly compartmentalized and, in fact, all these “interests” ultimately converged to delivering value to clients while running a responsible business. Without sharing more detail here, I was taken aback by his confidence in his presentation of his views, of his philosophy of business, capitalism, entrepreneurship, and society. (I am proud of the results created by our entire partnership group. I feel like we did something pretty special.)
Where does this all lead? In Taleb’s book, Fooled by Randomness, he opens with a story of the wealthy Croesus, King of Lydia, who was visited by Solon, a wise Greek legislator. The takeaway of the story is similar to that from The Story of the Tsaoist Farmer or Yoggi Berra’s, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” In my words, “It is too soon to tell.” In the meantime, I will hope that the present suffering is causing a newly strengthened world order on which future progress can be made on foundations of democracy, ecological responsibility, and respect for human rights, and that the NATO alliance leadership had high levels of “readiness” when studying the history of decisions by the likes of Chamberlin, Kennedy, and Kharkov, and have the wisdom to identify where analogs “fit” and where they don’t. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I am not a religious man, but I think a prayer for this form of convergence is worthy of our efforts. #pascalswager
Thank you for reading my blog. If you have thoughts on these topics and how we can make a positive impact, please reach out directly. My cell is (814) 360-4699. I have a business partner with family still in Ukraine and he is consolidating a list of charities to maximize impact. I am happy to share if you are interested.
Comments
Thank you Jens. Your post captures the sad tension of the present situation. The multiple philosophical points of references are helpful, and relevant, and the final statement for personal action drives meaning. Thank you for sharing.