Meurtre en Beaujolais - André Corman

 

• Un roman qui se lit en quelques jours pour tous les amoureux du Beaujolais des années 1960. Une énigme qui se déroule entre Beaujolais et Dombes avec des dialogues plein d’humour et pleinement local et des personnages hauts en couleurs.

The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel

 

The dilemma of luck versus talent

• Saving is income minus ego.

No one's crazy

• Two topics impact everyone, wether you are interested in them or not: health and money.
• Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what's happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
• Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood.
• We all make decisions based on our unique experiences that seem to make sense to us in a given moment.

Luck and risk

• Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
• It's possible to statistically measure wether some decisions were wise. But in the real world, day to day, we simply don't. It's too hard. We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.
• We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance.
• The line between "inspiringly bold" and "foolishly reckless" can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.
• Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.
• Realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
• Therefore focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.
• People who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it.
• Bill Gates: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose".
• Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there don't wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall into your favor.

Never Enough

• Madoff was a market maker, a job that matches buyers and sellers of stocks.
• Mr. Madoff's firm can execute trades so quickly and cheaply that it actually pays other brokerage firms a penny a share to execute their customer's orders, profiting from the spread between bid and ask prices that most stocks trade for.
• There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.
• The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost (poteau de but) to stop moving.
• Happiness is just results minus expectations.
• Social comparison is the problem here.
• Accept that you might have enough, even if it is less than those around you.
• "Enough" is not too little.
• There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain:
• Reputation is invaluable.
• Freedom and independence are invaluable.
• Family and friends are invaluable.
• Being loved by those you want to love is invaluable.
• Happiness is invaluable.
• and your best shot at keeping these things is knowing when it's time to stop taking risks that might harm them.

Confounding compounding

• Lessons from one field can often teach us something important about unrelated fields.
• The big takeaway from ice ages is that you don't need tremendous force to create tremendous results.
• More than 2000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffet built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay attention enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffet's fortune isn't due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write Warren Buffet's net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 came after he qualified fo Social Security, in his mid-60s.
• His skill is investing, but his secret is time.
• You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow.
• Shut up and wait.

Getting wealthy vs Staying wealthy

• Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It's about consistently not screwing up.
• There are a million ways to get wealthy, and plenty of books on how to do so.
• But there's only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.
• Getting money is one thing. Keeping it is another.
• Getting money and keeping money are two different skills.
• We assume that tomorrow won't be like yesterday. We can't afford to rest on our laurels. We can't be complacent. We can't assume that yesterday's success translates into tomorrow's good fortune.
• And longevity - investing consistently from age 10 to at least age 89 - is what made compounding work wonders.
• Nassim Taleb put it this way " Having an "edge" and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs".
• Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to the plan.
• Room for error - often call margin for safety - is one of the most under appreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline - anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes.
• A barbelled personality - optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future - is vital.

Tails, you win

• You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
• The great investors bought vast quantities of art.
• The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It's also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.
• Your success as an investor will be determined by how you respond to punctuated moments of terror, not the years spend on cruise control.
• A good definition of an investing genius is the man or woman who can do the average thing when all this around them are going crazy.
• "It's not wether you're right or wrong that's important", George Soros once said, "but how much money you make when you're righted you much you lose when you're wrong". You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.

Freedom

• Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.
• The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend pays.
• Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.
• People feel like they're in control - in the driver's seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.
• When you accept how true that statement is, you realize that aligning money towards a life that lets you do what you want, when you want, with who you want, where you want, for as long as you want, has incredible return.
• More of us have jobs that look close to Rockefeller than a typical 1950s manufacturing worker, which means our days don't end when we clock out and leave the factory. We're constantly working in our heads, which means it feels like work never ends.
• Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.

Man in the car paradox

• No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.
• Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.

Wealth is what you don't see

• Spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.
• The truth is that wealth is what you don't see.
• The only way to be wealthy is to not spend the money that you don't have.
• But wealth is hidden. It's income not spent. Wealth is an option not yet taken to buy something later.

Save money

• Money relies more on psychology than finance.
• Having more control over your timed options is becoming one of the most valuable currencies in the world.

Reasonable rational

• A one-degree increase in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of some virus by a factor of 200.
• It may be rational to want a fever if you have an infection. But it's not reasonable.
• Acting on investment forecasts is dangerous.

Surprise

• An overreliance on past data as a signal to future conditions in a field where innovation and change are the lifeblood of progress.
• The most important driver of anything tied to money is the stories people tell themselves and the preference they have for goods and services. Those things don't tend to sit still. They change with culture and generation. They're always changing and always will.
• Realizing that the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.
• But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something in that the world is difficult to anticipate. That's the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.
• The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that the world use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next.
• There was no such thing as venture capital. An aspiring young entrepreneur had very few places to turn, and those places were all guarded by risk-averse gatekeepers with zero imagination. In other words, bankers.
• The Intelligent Investor is one of the greatest investing books of all time. But I don't know a single investor who has one well implementing Graham's published formulas. 
• General things like people's relationship to greed and fear, how they behave under stress, and how they respond to incentives tend to be stable in time.

Room for error

• You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.
• We must make sure that we enough money to withstand any swings of bad luck.
• The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.
• But people underestimate the need for room for error in almost everything they do that involves money.
• Can you survive your assets declining by 30%?
• The solution is simple: Use room for error when estimating your future returns.
• The ability to do what you want, when you want, for as long a you want, has an infinite ROI.
• You can plan for every risk except the things that are too crazy to cross your mind.
• It's fine to save for a car, or a home, or for retirement. But it's equally important to save things you can't possibly predict or even comprehend.
• I save a lot, and I have no idea what I'll use the savings for in the future.

You'll change

• Long-term planning is harder than it seems because people's goals and desires change over time.
• Yourself, don't know today what you will even want in the future.
• The trick is to accept the reality of change and move on as soon as possible.
• I have no sunk costs.
• Sunk costs - anchoring decisions to past efforts that can't be refunded - are a devil in a world where people change over time.

Nothing's free

• Every job looks easy when you're not the one doing it.

You and me

• Beware taking financial cues from people playing a different game than you are.
• Investors often innocently take cues from other investors who are playing a different game than they are.
• Momentum attracts short-term traders in a reasonable way.
• What do you expect people to do when momentum creates a big-short term return potential? Sit and watch patiently? Never. That's not how the world works. Profits will always be chased.
• I am a passive investor optimistic in the world's ability to generate real economic growth and I am confident that over the next 30 years that growth will accrue my investments.

The seduction of pessimism

• Pessimism just sounds smarter and more plausible than optimism.
• Tell someone that everything will be great and they're likely to either shrug you off or offer a skeptical eye. Tell someone they're in danger and you have their undivided attention.
• When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative operations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
• Progress happens too slowly to notice, but setbacks happen too quickly to ignore.
• In investing you must identify the price of success - volatility and loss amid the long backdrop of growth - and be willing to pay it.

When you'll believe anything

• The more you want something to be true, the more likely you are to believe a story that overestimates the odds of being true.
• I don't know what I don't know. So I am just as susceptible to explaining the world through the limited set of mental models I have at my disposal.
• The outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts.

All together now

• Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong.
• Less ego, more wealth.
• Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
• If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon.
• Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
• It's fine to have a large chunk of poor investments and a few outstanding ones.
• Use money to gain control over your time.
• Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.
• Savings for things that are impossible to predict or define is one of the best reasons to save.
• Avoid the extreme ends of financial decisions.
• You should like risk because it pays off over time.
• Define the game you're playing.

Confessions

• What works for one person may not work for another.
• You have to find what works for you.
• Independence, to me, doesn't mean you'll stop working. It means you only do the work you like with people you like at the times you want as long as you want.
• Most of what we get pleasure from, going for walks, reading, podcast, costs little, so we rarely feel like we're missing out.
• True success is exiting some rat race to modulate one's activities for peace of mind.
• Good decisions aren't always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being "right".
• What are you saving for? A house? A boat? A new car? No, none of those.
• The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.
• The world is driven by tails, a few variables account for the majority of returns.
• My investing strategy doesn't rely on picking the right sector, or timing the next recession. It relies on a high savings rate, patience, and optimism that the global economy will create value over the next several decades.
• The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.

Résultat du Marathon du Beaujolais 2021

 

Résultat marathon Beaujolais 2021

Un très beau marathon couru dans la bonne humeur, une super ambiance en compagnie de Michel et Benjamin. Le cinquième dans la série des marathons du Beaujolais, et le dix-neuvième marathon au total.Un parcours fantastique, plein d’émotions entre les kilomètres 11 et 17 : passage par Pizay, Saint Ennemond, Cercié. La difficulté principale commence à partir du 30 ème kilomètre et cela jusqu’au 35 ème kilomètre. Même si je m’en suis pas mal sorti lors de ce passage en pente, mes quadriceps ont dû souffrir car pour le reste des sept derniers kilomètres, j’ai eu beaucoup de difficulté et des douleurs dans les quadriceps, alors que la fin de parcours était descendante. Ensuite le final dans la rue nationale et les applaudissements et encouragement des supporters : la fatigue et la concentration sur le désir de finir est tellement intense que je ne les entends pas, tellement je suis dans ma concentration. Enfin la délivrance à la vue de la ligne d’arrivée et la joie toujours nouvelle et fantastique de passer la ligne.

Sur la ligne d’ arrivée

Noise - Daniel Kahneman

 

Introduction - Deux types d'erreur

• Le biais et le bruit, l'écart systématique et la dispersion aléatoire, sont deux composantes différentes de l'erreur.
• Une des propriétés générales du bruit est qu'il est possible de l'identifier et de le mesurer sans rien savoir ni de la cible ni bu biais.
• Le bruit est la face cachée de l'erreur.

Partie I - Détecter le bruit

Chapitre 1 - Crime et châtiment

• Le remplacement des personnes par les machines.
• Juger est un art difficile.

Chapitre 2 - Un bruit systémique

• Dans un audit de bruit, le même problème est traité par plusieurs individus, et la variabilité de leurs réponses éclate au grand jour.
• La variabilité des jugements n'est pas toujours indésirable.
• Quand plusieurs équipes au sein de la même entreprise rivalisent pour apporter des solutions innovantes au même besoin du marché, il n'est pas forcément souhaitable qu'elles adoptent la même approche.
• Sur un marché comme dans la nature, la sélection ne peut pas fonctionner sans variation.
• Une grande société de gestion d'actifs demanda à quarante-deux investisseurs expérimentés travaillant dans la société d'estimer le "juste prix" d'une action (c'est à dire le prix du marché auquel ils ne trouveraient ni justifié ni de la vendre ni de l'acheter). L'estimation se fondait sur un descriptif de l'entreprise concernée, comprenant les comptes de résultat, les bilans et les flux des trois années antérieures, ainsi que les projections pour les deux années à venir. Le bruit médian était de 41%.
• Dans les systèmes sujets au bruit, les erreurs ne s'annulent pas : elles se cumulent.
• Illusion d'accord : alors qu'ils étaient en réalité en désaccord profond dans leurs jugements professionnels quotidiens.
• L'inconfort du désaccord : la plupart des organisations préfèrent le consensus et l'harmonie au désaccord et au conflit.

Chapitre 3 - Les décisions singulières

• Nous avons défini le bruit comme la variabilité indésirable des jugements relatifs au même problème.
• Si les mêmes faits avaient été présentés de façon légèrement différente, la conversation se serait-elle déroulée de la même façon.
• Qu'un problème se présente cent fois ou une seule, votre objectif devrait être le même : réduire à la fois le biais et le bruit qui affectent votre décision.

Partie II - Votre esprit est un instrument de mesure

• En statistique, la mesure la plus courante de la variabilité est l'écart-type.
• Les individus ne sont jamais parfaits. Leurs jugements sont toujours entachés d'erreurs.

Chapitre 4 - Question de jugement

• Anticipation de désaccord limité.
• Ce que vous avez retenu n'est pas identique à ce qu'auront retenu d'autres lecteurs. Ainsi, l'attention sélective et la mémoire sélective sont une première source de variabilité entre les personnes.
• Toute incohérence porte atteinte à la crédibilité du système.
• Un jugement probabiliste n'est pas vérifiable.

Chapitre 5 - Mesurer l'erreur

• Les moindres carrés : Gauss proposa une règle nouvelle pour évaluer la contribution des erreurs individuelles à l'erreur d'ensemble. Sa mesure de l'erreur globale est appelée erreur quadratique moyenne et généralement abrégée MSE, d'après l'anglais Mean Squared Error. C'est la moyenne des carrés des erreurs des moyennes. La mise au carré donne aux grandes erreurs un poids bien plus élevé qu'aux petites.
• Pour faire le choix optimal, les personnes qui décident doivent considérer de multiples options et mesurer les avantages et inconvénients de celles-ci à l'aune de leurs propres valeurs.

Chapitre 6 - L'analyse du bruit

• Le bruit de niveau, c'est le fait que les juges aient des niveaux de sévérité différents.
• Le bruit de pattern, c'est le fait qu'ils ne soient pas d'accord entre eux sur le point de savoir quels prévenus méritent des peines les plus sévères.
• Dans un monde parfait, les prévenus avaient affaire à la justice ; dans le monde actuel, ils ont affaire à un système judiciaire sujet au bruit.

Chapitre 7 - Le bruit occasionnel

• Nous ne produisons pas toujours des jugements identiques quand nous sommes confrontés deux fois aux mêmes données.
• Sagesse des foules : faire la moyenne des jugements produits de manière indépendante par des personnes différentes produit généralement un jugement plus exact.
• Repensons-y-demain, la nuit porte conseil.
• Vous n'êtes pas la même personne tout le temps.
• Vous n'êtes pas toujours la même personne, et vous êtes moins cohérent dans le temps, moins semblable à vous-même, que vous ne l'imaginez.

Chapitre 8 - Les groupes et le bruit

• Dans toutes les organisations, la conjonction de cascades informationnelles et des cascades de pression sociale peut produire une grande confiance, et un soutien unanime, sur un jugement erroné.
• Quand un groupe apporte un soutien unanime à un projet, on oublie un peu vite que cet accord peut-être le fruit non pas de sa conviction, mais des cascades informationnelles et de la pression sociale.
• Le principe de polarisation du groupe : quand les gens se parlent, ils convergent en général sur une opinion plus radicale que leurs opinions initiales. La délibération conduit les jurys à une clémence plus grande quand le juré médian est clément, et à une sévérité plus grande quand le juré médian est sévère.
• Les décisions finales peuvent dépendre fortement des jugements de quelques individus : ceux qui parlent en premier ou qui ont la plus grande influence.

Partie III - Le bruit dans les jugements prédictifs

• L'ignorance objective : l'avenir dépend de beaucoup de choses que nous ne pouvons simplement pas connaître.

Chapitre 9 - Jugements et modèles

• Meehl y concluait sans ambiguïté que les règles automatiques étaient généralement supérieures au jugement humain.

Chapitre 10 - Le silence des formules

• En réalité, de nombreuses méthodes de prédiction mécanique, allant de règles ridiculement simples à des algorithmes d'une sophistication extrême, peuvent surpasser le jugement humain.

Chapitre 11 - L'ignorance objective

• Déni de l'ignorance.

Chapitre 12 - Dans la vallée des choses normales

• Bien entendu, les algorithmes d'apprentissage automatique formés à partir d'un grand ensemble de données font mieux que des modèles linéaires simples (et, par extension, que des humains)
• Même avec une masse imposante d'informations supposées prédictives, il reste extraordinairement difficile de prévoir des évènements précis dans la vie des gens.
• Quand un résultat est inattendu mais pas surprenant, et quand on vous l'explique de cette façon, on parvient toujours à lui trouver un sens. C'est cela que nous voulons dire quand nous disons que nous  une histoire. Et c'est ce qui fait que la réalité parait prévisible - après coup, quand nous la regardons dans le rétroviseur. Comme l'évènement s'explique lui-même en se produisant, nous entretenons aisément l'illusion que nous aurions pu l'anticiper.
• Nous avons mis en évidence deux manières radicalement différente de penser les évènements : la pensée statistique et la pensée causale.
• Le problème est que la pensée causale, en nous donnant l'illusion de comprendre le passé, contribue aussi à ce que nous produisions des prédictions excessivement confiantes dans l'avenir.

Partie IV - D’où vient le bruit ?

Chapitre 13 - Heuristiques, biais et bruit

• http://yourbias.is 
• Quand des personnes évaluent le temps qu’il faudra pour mener à bien un projet, la moyenne de leurs estimations est généralement très en dessous du temps que le projet demandera réellement. Ce biais psychologique bien connu est appelé erreur de prévision ou biais du planificateur.
• L’insensibilité à l’étendue.
• Le mot « biais » peut aussi signifier qu’un individu privilégie a priori une conclusion particulière : il est biaisé par un conflit d’intérêts ou par son adhésion à certaines thèses politiques.
• Le biais de substitution.
• L’utilisation de la ressemblance en lieu et place de la probabilité n’est pas le seul exemple de substitution d’une question à une autre.
• Heuristique de disponibilité.
• Biais de conclusion.
• Nous aurons tendance à recueillir et à interpréter les informations de façon sélective pour justifier un jugement que nous croyons déjà (c’est le biais de confirmation) ou dont nous souhaitons qu ‘il soit vrai (c’est le biais de désirabilité)
• Heuristique de l’affect : les gens décident de ce qu’ils croient en fonction de ce qu’ils ressentent.
• Biais d’ancrage.
• Que vous marchandiez aux puces, ou que vous participez à une transaction complexe, vous aurez probablement intérêt, quand on en viendra aux chiffres, à parler le premier et à « ancrer » la discussion sur votre chiffre.
• Effet de halo.

Chapitre 14 - Équivalences

• En présence d’indications contradictoires, il devient plus difficile de parvenir au sentiment de cohérence nécessaire à la formulation d’un jugement satisfaisant.
• Les prédictions par équivalence sont trop extrêmes, qu’elles soient optimistes ou pessimistes. Le terme technique pour ces prédictions intuitives est qu’elles sont non régressives, parce qu’elles omettent de prendre en compte un phénomène statistique appelé la régression vers la moyenne.
• Système 1 : intuitif.
• Système 2 : réfléchi
• En particulier, on est moins prompt à formuler des prédictions par équivalence quand les données disponibles sont défavorables.
• Pour corriger les prédictions intuitives, qu’elles qu’elles soient, une solution s’impose : la vision externe.
• Le chiffre magique de sept, plus ou moins deux.

Chapitre 15 - Échelles

• Indignation partagée et indemnités erratiques.
• Le choix de l’échelle qui sert à formuler les jugements est essentiel : plus les échelles sont ambiguës, plus elles sont source de bruit. Quand il est possible de remplacer des jugements absolus par des jugements relatifs ou ordinaux, il est très probable que cela contribue à réduire le bruit.

Chapitre 16 - Patterns

• La confiance subjective dans un jugement n’en garantit nullement l’exactitude. En outre, la suppression des interprétations alternatives - un processus perceptif aujourd’hui bien établi - contribue à ce que nous avons appelé l’illusion d’accord.
• C’est aussi ce qui arrive à l’investisseur normalement prudent qui se laisse séduire, contre toute attente, par le business plan d’une stratus prometteuse.
• Des personnes qui ont des spécialités et des aptitudes différentes vont nécessairement prendre en compte des dimensions différentes d’un même problème.
• Les comportements sont fonction à la fois des personnalités et des situations.
• Auriez-vous négligé des interprétations alternatives des éléments  dont vous disposez ?

Chapitre 17 - Les composantes du bruit

• Constance sans consensus.
• Il nous est facile de donner un sens aux évènements a posteriori, même si nous n'avons pas pu les prévoir avant qu'ils ne se produisent.
• L'erreur d'attribution fondamentale nous conduit à attribuer aux personnes des actions et des résultats qui s'expliquent en réalité par la chance ou par des circonstances objectives.
• Liste des biais psychologiques : l'erreur de prévision, l'excès de confiance, l'aversion à la perte, l'effet de dotation, le biais du statu-quo, le biais pour le présent et beaucoup d'autres.
• Le bruit est statistique.

Partie V - Améliorer les jugements

• Hygiène de la décision.
• L'agrégation de jugements indépendants.

Chapitre 18 - De meilleurs juges pour de meilleurs jugements

• Heuristique de la confiance : dans un groupe, les individus confiants ont plus de poids que les autres, même si leur confiance en eux n'est pas fondée sur une supériorité réelle.
• Le cas du caractère consciencieux et du grit, défini comme un mélange d'erreur et de persévérance dans la poursuite d'objectifs de long terme (ce qu'on appelle familièrement la "niaque")
• Certaines personnes aiment réfléchir attentivement, tandis que d'autres, face au même problème, ont tendance à faire confiance à leur intuition première.
• Etre activement ouvert d'esprit, c'est rechercher de manière proactive des informations qui contredisent nos hypothèses actuelles.
• Si les scores de réflexion cognitive et de besoin de cognition mesurent la propension à se livrer à la pensée lente et attentive, la pensée "activement ouverte d'esprit" va encore plus loin. Elle traduit l'humilité de ceux qui savent que leurs jugements sont des produits éternellement imparfaits, qui les remettent sans cesse sur le métier et qui souhaitent ardemment les corriger.
• La personne dotée de ce style cognitif cherche activement de nouvelles informations susceptibles de contredire ses convictions.
• Quand l'objectif est de produire des bons jugements et de réduire les erreurs, mieux vaut que le chef (et tous ceux qui l'entourent) reste ouvert à des contre-arguments et soit pleinement conscient qu'il peut se tromper.

Chapitre 19 - Réduction des biais et hygiène de la décision

• Vous corrigerez le biais optimiste que vous supposez présent (le biais du planificateur)
• Le ministère britannique des Finances a ainsi publié un guide pour l'évaluation des programmes et des projets. Pour corriger les biais optimistes dans les prévisions de coût et de durée des projets, ce manuel suggère aux planificateurs d'appliquer des ajustements de pourcentage à leurs estimations initiales.
• L'heuristique de disponibilité.
• Dans une décision d'investissement, par exemple, l'excès de confiance peut certainement jouer.
• L'aversion de la perte.
• Les agences fédérales doivent détailler la raison, pour laquelle la règlementation est nécessaire, démontrer qu'elles ont envisagé des alternatives plus ou moins contraignantes, évaluer les coûts et les bénéfices de ces différentes options, présenter les informations de façon non biaisée, et utiliser des taux d'actualisation appropriés dans leurs calculs des impacts futurs.
• L'hygiène de la décision.

Chapitre 20 - Police scientifique : le séquencement de l'information

• Le point aveugle des biais, c'est à dire la tendance à voir le biais chez autrui, mais pas chez soi.
• Vous savez déjà, par exemple, que vos jugements peuvent être altérés par la colère, la peur ou d'autres émotions.
• L'information, y compris quand elle est exacte, est aussi un facteur de bruit occasionnel qui altère notre jugement.
• Un bon décideur devrait toujours essayer de conserver "l'ombre d'un doute", pour ne pas être "l'homme qui en savait trop".

Chapitre 21 - Prévision : l'agrégation et la sélection

• La technique d'hygiène de la décision la plus universellement applicable : agréger un grand nombre d'estimations indépendantes.
• Le moyen le plus simple d'agréger plusieurs prévisions est d'en calculer la moyenne. Le résultat est mathématiquement garanti : prendre la moyenne de n jugements divise le bruit par la racine carrée de n. Si, par exemple, vous utilisez la moyenne de cent jugements, vous réduirez le bruit de 90%, et si vous faites la moyenne de quatre cents jugements, vous le réduirez de 95% - ce qui revient pratiquement à l'éliminer. Cette loi statistique est le moteur de l'effet "sagesse des foules".
• C'est pourquoi la sagesse des foules fonctionne mieux quand les jugements de la "foule" sont indépendants les uns des autres : ils sont alors moins susceptibles d'être entachés d'erreurs partagées, c'est à dire de biais.
• Confiance à une stratégie qui ne repose pas seulement sur l'agrégation, mais aussi sur la sélection.
• Méthode Delphi.
• Mini-Delphi : estimation-discussion-estimation.
• Inciter les participants à se tenir informés des actualités et à réviser leurs prévisions aussi souvent que nécessaire.
• L'aisance avec laquelle ils réfléchissent de façon probabiliste et analytique.
• Ils se posent toute une série de questions subsidiaires auxquelles ils essaient de répondre séparément.
• Ils sont très attentifs aux taux de base.
• Activement ouvert d'esprit.
• Les gens devraient prendre en considération les faits contraires à ce qu'ils croient.
• Il est plus utile de prêter attention aux gens qui ne sont pas d'accord avec vous qu'à ceux qui sont d'accord.
• L'indice le plus puissant qu'un participant deviendra un superprévisionniste est le bêta perpétuel : sa proposition à actualiser continuellement ses prévisions et à améliorer sans cesse sa performance.
• Le biais de confirmation et l'excès de confiance, ainsi que l'importance de calculer la moyenne de multiples prédictions issues de plusieurs sources.
• Eviter les dangers de polarisation de groupe et des cascades informationnelles.
• L'importance d'agréger des jugements multiples, formulés par des individus judicieusement sélectionnés pour leur compétence, pour leur style cognitif, et pour leur diversité.
• Nous avons les meilleurs dans cette équipe, mais avons-nous assez de diversité d'opinions ?
• Quand les faits changent, je change d'avis. Et vous, qu'est-ce que vous faites ?

Chapitre 22 - Médecine : les directives.

• Stratégie d'hygiène de la décision souvent employée : l'élaboration de directives.
• La formation peut élever le niveau de compétence, et de meilleures compétences, à l'évidence, réduisent le bruit.
• Les psychiatres ont de grandes difficultés à s'entendre sur qui souffre ou non d'un trouble dépressif grave.

Chapitre 23 - Evaluation de la performance : le choix de l'échelle.

Chapitre 24 - Recrutement : la structuration des jugements complexes.

• Ainsi fonctionne notre étonnante aptitude à trouver de la cohérence là où il n'y en a pas.
• La structuration des jugements complexes. "Structurer" peut vouloir dire beaucoup de choses. Au sens où nous l'entendons ici, structurer un jugement complexe, c'est appliquer trois principes. D'abord, la décomposition d'un jugement en éléments séparés. Ensuite, l'indépendance, qui impose de gérer le processus de collecte d'informations pour s'assurer que les inputs soient indépendantes les uns des autres. Enfin, le jugement global différé, qui retarde la décision d'ensemble et le jugement final jusqu'à ce que tous ces inputs aient été recueillis.
• Nous devons mettre de la structure dans nos entretiens et, plus largement, dans nos processus de sélection. Commençons par définir de façon plus claire et précise ce que nous recherchons chez les candidats. Assurons-nous qu'ils soient évalués de façon indépendante sur chacun des critères retenus. Enfin, différons le moment du jugement global.

Chapitre 25 - Le protocole d'évaluations intermédiaires.

• Il peut être utilisé en agences gouvernementales.
• Elle s'inspire de la similitude entre l'évaluation d'une option stratégique et l'évaluation d'un candidat à l'embauche.
• Structurer la décision.
• Les jugements relatifs sont plus fiables que les jugements absolus.
• L'importance de l'indépendance dans les jugements.
• Quand les évaluations sont faites indépendantes les unes des autres, l'excès de cohérence est neutralisé. La réalité apparaît, avec ses complexités, ses incertitudes et ses ambiguïtés.
• Risques d'influence sociale et de cascade informationnelle.
• Prenons l'exemple d'un critère essentiel pour tout fonds de capital risque : l'évaluation d'une équipe d'entrepreneurs. 
• Pour prendre une décision importante, utiliser son intuition et son jugement est valorisant : suivre une méthode prédéfinie l'est moins.
• L'un des principes essentiels est de susciter des jugements indépendants, et de provoquer le débat et la confrontation sur ces jugements.
• C'est une décision difficile. Quels sont les critères d'évaluation intermédiaire sur lesquels elle devrait reposer ?
• Notre jugement intuitif global sur ce projet est important, mais n'en parlant pas pour l'instant. Notre intuition nous sera plus utile une fois qu'elle sera informée par les évaluations séparées que nous avons demandées.

Partie VI - Le bruit optimal

• L'agrégation de jugements indépendants est une bonne idée.
• La codification d'une échelle commune ancrée sur la vision externe.

Chapitre 28 - Les coûts de réduction du bruit.

• La réduction du bruit à un coût ; et ses bénéfices attendus doivent lui être supérieurs.
• La critique est quelquefois purement rhétorique, et ne vise qu'à faire capoter une réforme qui aurait en réalité beaucoup de bienfaits.
• Les algorithmes peuvent être supérieurs au jugement humain sur n'importe quelle combinaison de critères retenus.
• Même si, dans un monde incertain, un algorithme prédictif ne peut jamais être parfait, il peut être moins imparfait que le jugement humain, qui est toujours sujet au bruit et souvent biaisé.

Chapitre 27 - Une affaire de dignité.

• Sans motivation, sans implication, et sans possibilité d'exercer son jugement et de développer ses compétences, il est difficile de trouver des idées nouvelles.
• Pour Howard, l'univers de la réglementation publique est devenu fou parce qu'il est trop rigide. Enseignants, agriculteurs, promoteurs, médecins : tous ces professionnels, et beaucoup d'autres, croulent sous des règles qui leur disent ce qu'ils doivent faire et comment le faire.
• Plus les principes sont généraux, et plus il faut s'attendre à ce qu'il y ait du bruit dans leur interprétation et dans leur mise en oeuvre, avec des conséquences qui peuvent être intolérables.

Chapitre 28 - Des règles ou des principes ?

• Pour réduire le bruit, ou pour décider si et comment le faire, on distinguera utilement deux modes de régulation des comportements : la règle, précise, et le principe, plus général.
• La règle est conçue pour éliminer toute possibilité d'appréciation par les personnes qui devront l'appliquer ; le principe, au contraire, pour leur en laisser une.
• Celui qui fixe une règle conserve le pouvoir, celui qui définit un principe le délègue en partie.
• Les community standards de Facebook ("normes de la communauté"), rendus publics pour la première fois en 2018, sont un mélange fascinant de règles et de principes, par ailleurs très nombreux.
• Quand les principes laissent le champ libre au bruit, et quand tout le monde peut observer que des individus placés dans la même situation ne sont pas traités de la même façon, on observe souvent un mouvement pour demander des règles.
• Le principal doit imposer des règles quand il a de bonnes raisons de ne pas faire confiance à son agent.
• Nous nous contentons souvent de principes quand nous devrions adopter des règles, simplement parce qu'il est plus facile de se mettre d'accord sur des principes et parce que nous ne prêtons pas attention au bruit.

Synthèse et conclusion - Prendre le bruit au sérieux

• L'erreur quadratique moyenne (mean squared error, ou MSE) est l'outil communément utilisé pour évaluer la justesse des mesures scientifiques depuis deux cents ans. La MSE a trois propriétés mathématiques qui sont importantes pour notre propos : elle est compatible avec l'intuition qui nous suggère que la moyenne d'un échantillon est la meilleure estimation de la moyenne de la population ; elle traite de la même manière les erreurs positives et les erreurs négatives ; et elle pénalise les grandes erreurs de façon plus importante que les petites.
• Les désaccords entre les traders permettent à la bourse de fonctionner.
• Le rôle majeur du bruit dans l'erreur contredit une croyance largement répandue selon laquelle les erreurs aléatoires n'ont pas d'importance parce qu'elles s'annulent les unes les autres. Cette croyance est erronée.
• Quand les juges sont plus cléments après une victoire de leur équipe de football favorite qu'après une défaite, par exemple, ou quand des médecins prescrivent davantage d'opioïdes en fin d'après-midi plutôt que le matin, on peut conclure à la présence de bruit occasionnel.
• L'avantage décisif des modèles et des règles, quels qu'ils soient, est d'être exempts de bruits.
• C'est pourquoi une décision irréfléchie mais constante à des règles, même très simples, peut produire des prédictions plus exactes qu'un jugement réfléchi mais inconstant.
• Quand toutes les informations disponibles ne convergent pas pour bâtir une histoire cohérente, des juges différents vont inévitablement donner plus de poids à certaines informations et en ignorer ou en sous-pondérer d'autres.
• La vision externe consiste à considérer le cas que l'on étudie comme un élément d'un ensemble plus vaste.
• Principe 1. Puisque l'objectif du jugement est la justesse, ne pas rechercher l'expression individuelle.
• Principe 2. Adopter la vision externe et la pensée statistique.
• Principe 3. Structurer les jugements en plusieurs tâches indépendantes.
• L'excès de cohérence : nous avons tendance à déformer ou à ignorer les informations qui ne correspondent pas à un récit préexistant ou émergent.
• Principe 4. Résister aux intuitions prématurées.
• Principe 5. Obtenir plusieurs jugements indépendants avant de les agréger.
• C'est notamment le cas dans les réunions où les participants s'influencent les uns les autres. A cause des effets de cascade et de polarisation de groupe, ces discussions de groupe augmentent souvent le niveau de bruit.
• Principe 6. Privilégier les jugements comparatifs et les échelles relatives.
• Le patient qui récupère après une opération réussie attribue volontiers son salut à l'habilité du chirurgien, et il a raison, bien sûr. Mais si le chirurgien et tout le personnel présent en salle d'opération ne s'étaient pas lavé les mains, le patient n'aurait peut-être pas survécu. L'hygiène n'est pas glorieuse, mais elle est vitale.
• En tout état de cause, une analyse coût bénéfice s'impose : si les mesures qui permettent de réduire le bruit sont plus coûteuses que le bruit lui-même, la réduction du bruit est inopportune.

Epilogue - Moins de bruit

• Les réunions ne ressembleraient pas à celles que nous connaissons aujourd'hui : on y organiserait systématiquement l'expression de jugements indépendants, et la discussion y serait structurée autour d'ordres du jour définis à l'avant. Les désaccords ouverts seraient plus fréquents, mais aussi résolus de façon plus constructive. Chacun serait plus attentif à ce que le jugement des autres apporte à l'exactitude des décisions.

Glossaire - Jugement, erreur, biais, bruit

• A la différence du calcul, où l'on n'attend pas de désaccord, et des opinions, où l'on tolère des désaccords importants, le jugement est caractérisé par une anticipation de désaccord limité entre juges compétents.
• Souvent sous-estimé par les juges : c'est l'illusion d'accord.

Annexe A - Conduire un audit de bruit

• Etude du processus de prise de décision.

Annexe C - Corriger les prédictions intuitives

• La performance passée n'est pas corrélée de façon parfaite avec la performance future.
• En partant de la vision externe, ajustez la prédiction dans la direction de votre jugement intuitif, dans une mesure qui correspond à la valeur prédictive des informations dont vous disposez.
• Il faut garder à l'esprit que les exceptions sont, par définition, extrêmement rares. Il est beaucoup plus fréquent de faire l'erreur inverse, et de prédire que des exceptions vont se produire, ou que des performances exceptionnelles vont le rester.

Marathon du Beaujolais J - 3

Dans trois jours, je participerai à mon 5ème marathon du Beaujolais. L'excitation est à son maximum. On espère que le beau temps sera de la partie.

Le parcours : 

L'entrainement aura duré environ 13 semaines avec le programme "La Bible du running" pour un objectif de 4 heures :

Le poids est revenu au poids de forme :

La VO2Max est bonne :

L'objectif sera de finir et le temps réaliste serait de finir entre 4h15 et 4h 30.

Cryptoasset Inheritance Planning

 

• Epiphany is a Greek word describing this moment of insight and sudden understanding.
• Your heirs shouldn't need to access your phone or computer to claim your assets.
• On the Ledger, I store BTC and BCH and use Ledger's software to access it.
• Passphrases: be sure to store them securely, separately from your plan if possible. In a fireproof, waterproof and locked location.
• La traduction française par DecouvreBitCoin ici.

Tout sur BITCOIN David St-ONGE

 

• Pour faire simple, pour recevoir des bitcoins, vous avez besoin d'une clé publique et pour en dépenser, vous avez besoin d'un clé privée.
• La solution trouvée pour sécuriser la clé publique, c'est de la multiplier.
• L'une des fonctions du portefeuille Bitcoin: il vous permet de générer des adresses Bitcoins, qui sont en quelque sorte des clés publiques jetables.
• Le portefeuille conserve votre clé privée et utilise votre clé publique pour générer des adresses Bitcoin.
• UTXOs: "Unspent Transaction Output" que l'on pourrait traduire comme le solde d'une transaction qui n'a pas encore été utilisée.
• Il est quand même beaucoup plus sûr d'utiliser un Trezor ou un Ledger que de laisser vos jetons sur une plateforme d'échange ou un téléphone.
• Bitcoin n'est absolument pas un système confidentiel.
• Son utilisation laisse des traces numériques qui sont récupérées par des compagnies spécialisées qui revendent ou partagent ces informations avec les gouvernements et différentes autres entités.
• Vous n'avez pas besoin d'avoir quelque chose de grave à cacher pour souhaiter plus d'anonymat.
• BTCPay Server : une personne qui voudrait vendre des produits par Internet pourrait trouver laborieux de générer manuellement de nouvelles adresses dans son portefeuille à chaque transaction. C'est de ça que se charge BTCPay server.
• Mon ordinateur utilise facilement 400 Watts de puissance lorsqu'il est en train de miner.
• https://mynodebtc.com : il est possible d'installer leur produit sur un mini-ordinateur de type Raspberry Pi.
• Les changements dans la société ne viennent pas d'en haut, ils viennent des individus.

Bubble or Revolution - The Present and Future of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies

 

Chapter 1: Bitcoin and the Blockchain

• Shared log, or ledger.
• Transactions are batched into blocks.
• The only way to mine a block is to guess nonces over and over until you win, like playing a digital lottery.
• The word nonce comes from "number used only once".

Chapter 2: Bitcoin Economics

• Intersubjective reality: you think this thing has value because you know that other people think it has value. Yuval Noah Harari.
• By one estimate, 30% of all mined bitcoins have been lost.
• The majority of Bitcoin users are speculators hoping to make a buck.
• The thing that makes currencies good is stability, while the thing that makes investments good is growth. These are, of course, mutually exclusive.
• Bitcoin may not be the future of money, but it may well be the future of investing.

Chapter 3: Bitcoin's Blunders

• Mempool: all unconfirmed transactions.
• Since Bitcoin can only process a few thousand transactions an hour (12000 to 15000 an hour at the time of writing), it took an average of 16 hours for a transaction to get confirmed and put on the blockchain.
• Fee spikes have become a common feature in Bitcoin rallies.
• Mike Hearn, a well-known early Bitcoin developer, estimated that Bitcoin could only handle about 3 transactions per second.
• The name "SegWit" is an abbreviation of "segregated witness"; the metadata with the signature is called the "witness", and it's "segregated" away from the main transaction data.
• The remarkable transparency of Bitcoin's blockchain makes Bitcoin far less anonymous than its supporters might make it out to be.
• The Bitcoin wallet is only as secure as its private key, and if someone gets ahold of that private key, the money is theirs, and if they steal it, it's practically irreversible.
• The only way to undo that theft is to make a "fork" of the blockchain that erases that theft from history.
• Experts say that the best approach is to keep long-term savings in cold storage and keep money for daily expenses in a normal internet-connected computer, known as "hot-storage".
• Bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible, by doing pointless arithmetic quintillion's of times a second.
• The University of Cambridge estimates that Bitcoin's annual energy consumption skyrocketed from about 6 Terawatt-hours (roughly the annual consumption of Luxembourg) in 2017 to over 80 terawatt-hours (roughly the annual power consumption of Finland in 2020)
• We're estimating that a MacBook can do one billion hashes per second, or 1GH/s.
• The popular pickaxe (pioche) theory argues that it's hard to get rich by participating in the latest technological craze, but it's very profitable to sell equipment to those who are.
• Bitmain now controls 70-80%. of the Bitcoin mining hardware market.
• Some smaller cryptocurrencies that are ASIC-Resistant, meaning that GPUs are actually the best way to mine them.
• At the time of writing, the number of Bitcoin full nodes hasn't budged from about 10000 in the last two years.
• This should worry any proponent of decentralization: the software that's at the heart of Bitcoin is primarily owned and maintained by a small group of people that are employed and funded by a single company. The potential for conflicts of interest and user-hostile changes by Blockstream is high

Chapter 4: Altcoins

• Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash's blockchains, software, community, developers, and roadmap are all different now.
• Buterin's big idea was that blockchain can do more than just record transactions: they can run code, host apps, store data, and really do any kind of computation.
• The remarkable part of smart contracts like these is that they will always operate as intended, once they are set in motion, humans can't mess with their behavior.
• Non-blockchain-powered institutions that smart contracts have to trust are known as oracles.
• Without people to watch them, algorithms can do some unfair things.
• Just like with money, middlemen bring costs and benefits. It's not always a good thing to get rid of them, but with DApps, at least there's an alternative to middlemen for situations where getting rid of them makes sense.
• Art critics are hailing the blockchain as the potential future of arts and culture: there's finally a way to prove that you, and only you, own a piece of digital art.
• While Bitcoin aims to be an investment vehicle and Ethereum aims to be an app platform, another class of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, aims to be just a classic payment system.
• The best-known stable coin is called Tether: each Tether coin (known as a USDT, for US dollar Tehtehr) always trades at $1.
• CDP: Collaterized Debt Position.
• You borrow DAI coins by using your ether as collateral; this loan is a CDP.
• MakerDAO runs another currency named MKR.
• ICO:Initial Coin Offerings, a crypto version of initial Public Offerings, or IPOs, when startups start selling shares on the stock market.
• Bitcoin isn't really anonymous. Every single payment is stored public and permanently on the blockchain, ssh anyone can see how wealthy people are, who does business with whom, and where money has flowed.
• Monero is popularly known as privacy coin.
• You can have a web browser run a snippet of Javascript code, the same kind of code that makes websites like Spotify and Google Docs Interactive, to mine Monero coins.
• You can see why crypto jackers love Monero: it's easy to mine it on a browser, and since it's totally anonymous, the crooks don't leave any fingerprints behind. This illustrates one of the fundamental tensions of cryptocurrencies: anything designed to promote privacy and anonymity, which are usually good things, ends up helping criminals more than anyone else.

Chapter 5: Public Blockchains

• The idea of blockchain voting relies on tokens, which are digital assets whose movement can be tracked on the blockchain.
• The big difference between tokens and ether is that anyone can create a token out of nothing and issue as many tokens as they want, whereas ether is the only official form of money on Ethereum, and new ether can only be madly mining.
• One potential solution to the anonymity problem is called homomorphic encryption.
• If you put a link to a webpage in a book or document or other webpage, there's a 50% chance that the link will no longer work after seven years.
• A project called FileCoin aims to pay people who store copies of IPFS files on their computers.
• No matter what blockchain you use, blockchains are slow: a classic centralized database called MySQL can handle 60000 times more transactions per second than Ethereum (which itself can handle five times as many as Bitcoin)
• The top selling points of blockchains are that they're decentralized, trustless, transparent, and tamper-proof.
• Blockchains are great technological innovations, but they aren't enough to drive social change, you have to think hard about getting people and institutions to change their behavior.
• That's a common problem for blockchain apps: focusing too much on the technical problems without thinking about the people problems.

Chapter 6: Business on the Blockchain

• Benefits: decentralization (many computers still keep copies of the blockchain), immutability (proof-of-work still makes it hard for an attacker to forge blocks) and transparency (everyone can get exactly the information they need without having to hunt down people across companies.
• Azure's blockchain-as-a-service feature.
• Blockchain technology has a remarkable amount of overlap with some of the other hot technology trends: cloud computing, big data, and machine learning.
• Implementing a private blockchain ins't really a technical challenge at all; it's a social challenge.
• In all three cases we explored, the hard part has been the people part.
• For most private e blockchains projects, it's not the technology that matters, it's getting adoption, getting people comfortable with change, and working out all the legal and financial difficulties that come up.

Chapter 7: Cryptocurrency Policy

• Exit scam: it's when a company raises money based on a white paper but disappears before building anything.

Chapter 8: What's next

• It had been rumored for years that Facebook would be adding a stable coin to WhatsApp and Messenger.
• But why would a social networking company get into crypto? The most obvious reason was that it would help Facebook track exactly what people where spending money on; which would be extremely valuable data for advisers.
• We think cryptocurrencies will primarily be used behind the scenes, such as for transactions between banks or for large payments between companies.
• China has made no secret that it's trying to make its yuan the world's primary reserve currency.
• Then we think China will build a prototype tokenized yuan and test it in Africa. China is Africa's largest economic partner and has been investing heavily in infrastructure throughout the continent. Given how volatile African currencies are, large swaths of the continent may welcome the relative transparency and stability of a tokenized yuan. Perhaps China will create a yuan-backed "Afro" currency that is adopted  throughout Africa, similar to the Euro in Europe.
• For IoT to succeed, IoT devices need a secure, tamper-proof, and decentralized way to store, access, and share data.

Chapter 9: Bubble or Revolution?

• Bitcoin futures, which are contracts saying a buyer will buy a certain number of items for a certain price at a certain time.
• The regulation is, on the whole, a good thing for crypto.
• So, while inflation is usually a bad thing for investors, it's a good thing for gold holders.
• It's clear that the two biggest use cases for cryptocurrencies going forward will be as payment methods (primarily for large or international transfers) and as investments (supplementing, but not replacing, stocks and bonds).
• Countries are adopting cryptocurrency, but by tokenizing their existing fiat currencies.
• The idea of an immutable, shared history of past transactions is extremely powerful.
• The technologists who created blockchain and cryptocurrencies were better at solving the thorny technical problems and not these social problems.

Wanting - Luke Burgis

 

• Sur le plan individuel, selon Girard, les hommes se haïssent parce qu'ils s'imitent. Le mimétisme engendre la rivalité, mais en retour la rivalité renforce le mimétisme. Il y a double logique, celle du désir et celle de l'imitation. En d'autres termes, faire de l'autre un modèle, c'est faire de lui un rival.
• www.lukeburgis.com

Introduction

• How my desires entrapped me in cycles of passion followed by disillusionment.
• Mimetic theory isn't like learning some impersonal law of physics, which you can study from a distance. It means learning something new about your own past that explains how your identity has been shaped and why certain people and things have exerted more influence over you and others.
• The truth is that desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I'm part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.
• It is models, not our "objective" analysis or central nervous system, that shapes our desires.
• Like a lot of high school students, he strived to gain admission to a prestigious university without questioning why he wanted to go there in the first place.
• "Human being fights not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence" Girard.
• In Girard's view, the root of the most violence is mimetic desire.
• "You find yourself trapped in all these bad mimetic cycles". Girard.
• When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk's rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal.
• Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
• Facebook was build around identity, that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models.
• Models of desire are what make Facebook such a potent drug.
• I bet on mimesis.
• History is the story of human desire.
• The terrorists would not have been driven to destroy symbols of the West's wealth and culture if, at some deep level, they had not secretly desired some of the same things.
• "The Power of Mimetic Desire" is about the hidden forces that influence why people want the things they want.
• We're becoming more aware of how fragile and interconnected the world's systems are. 
• Public health has been challenged because even the best policies have to contend with groups of people who want different things.

The Power of Mimetic Desire

Hidden models

• The Romantic Lie is self-delusion, the story people tell about why they make certain choices: because it fits their personal preferences, or because they see its objective qualities, or because they simply saw it and therefore wanted it. They believe that there is a straight line between them and the things they want. That's a lie.
• People paying attention to other people's eye and reading things about their intentions and desires.
• Start with "why"
• Desire is the better place to start.
• If we receive a response to an email or text that doesn't sufficiently tone-match, we can go into a mini-crisis (Does she not like me? Does he think he's superior to me?  Did I do something wrong?). Communication practically runs on mimesis.
• My friend has become a model of desire to me.
• I'll start to make decisions based on what he wants.
• In the passage from childhood to adulthood, the open imitation of the infant becomes the hidden mimesis of adults.
• Mimetic desire operates in the dark. Those who can see in the dark take full advantage.
• He had seen opportunities where others saw obstacles.
• Models influence desire.
• Name your models. Think seriously about the people you least want to succeed.
• She influenced my desire by denying it.
• It's the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily, they seem like gifts, while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
• Efficient market theory is the belief that asset prices are functions of all available information.
• "Conformity is a powerful force that can counteract gravity for longer than skeptics expect". Jason Zweig.

Distorted Reality

• Imitate me, but not too much.
• Because rivalry is a function of proximity.
• Satoshi Nakamoto boosted his mimetic value into the upper stratosphere of Celebristan through secrecy.
• We are most likely to take someone as a model if they don't seem to be suffering from desire like us.
• Cats are mercurial (changeant). They usually seem uninterested in your opinion.
• Liquid modernity is a chaotic phase of history in which there are no culturally agree-upon models to follow, no fixed points of reference.
• The modern world is one of experts.
• We're model addicts. Right now, the models we prefer are experts.
• Principle of reflexivity. In situations that have thinking participants, there is a two-way interaction between the participants thinking and the situation in which they operate. Investors perceive there might be a crash, so they behave in a way that participates to the crash.
• People worry about what other people will think before they say something, which affects what they say.
• "Spiral of silence". Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.
• People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do. This increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion.
• Winston Churchill: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us"
• Mimetic desire is a truth at the heart of human relations;
• Our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us.
• Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media.

Social Contagion

• "If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities" René Girard.
• Karl Max and William Shakespeare had very different views about why people fight. Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. Shakespeare's view seems to be exactly the opposite: people fight when they are similar.
• Soccer stars Christiana Ronaldo and Lionel Messi may be celebrities to most of us, but to each other they are not. The same was now true of Ferrari and Lamborghini.
• In a bullfight, a bull is maneuvered into submission not by strength but by agility and psychology.
• Lanborghini enjoyed a peaceful final twenty years of his life in his vineyard, giving guests personal tour off his estate.
• "Meme". Richard Dawkins was attempting to explain the spread across time and space of nonmaterial things such as ideas, behaviors, and phrases. He called these things memes: cultural units of information that spread from person to person through a process of imitation.
• An internet meme is a deliberate alteration of something.
• To try to forge an identity relative to other people.
• They were too many changes, too fast, including the adoption of an experimental flat management structure. It created chaos.
• Most people gauge their happiness relative to other people.
• A good leader needs to consider the impact of their decisions on human ecology, the web of relationships that affect human life and development. No aspect of human ecology is more overlooked than mimetic desire.
• The idea and organization needed to come from someone other than me for not to feel like a top-down imposition of cultural expectations.
• Like the value of protecting the health and safety of all employees versus keeping the business running during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference.

The Invention of Blame

• The scapegoat mechanism turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one. It brings temporary peace as people forget their mimetic conflicts for a while, having just discharged all their anger onto a scapegoat.
• The scapegoating mechanism does no hinge on the guilt or innocence on the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.
• Anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when they are weak ties between people, as they are often online.
• A mimetic model, a person who knows what he wants.
• Nearly all people are religious in the sense that they subconsciously believe that sacrifice brings space.
• If only we could destroy that other political party, that other company, those terrorists, that troublemaker, that fast-food joint next door that has caused me to gain ten pounds, everything would be better. The sacrifice always seems right and proper. Our violence is good violence; the violence of the other side is always bad.
• The original scapegoat mechanism brought order out of chaos, but the order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos is meant to shake up the "orderly" system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change. The death of George Floyd in the United States in May 2020 is one salient example.
• One claims victim status as a way of gaining advantage or justifying one's behavior.
• Protect me from what I want.

The Transformation of Desire

Anti-mimetic - Feeding the People, Not the System

• What have we done in the past, where are we today, and what do we want for tomorrow?
• Nobody will question your goals.
• But it's worth asking where goals come from in the first place. Every goal is embedded within a system.
• Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals.
• And that's when I began my miserable fifteen-month career in Advanced Excel and PowerPoint.
• Social media platforms thrive on mimesis. Twitter encourages and measures by showing how many times each post has been retweeted.
• The deathbed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.

Disruptive Empathy

• If I decline to shake your hand, if, in short, I refuse to imitate you, then your are now the one who imitates me, by reproducing my refusal, by copying me instead. Imitation, which usually expresses agreement in this case, now serves to confirm and strengthen disagreement. Once again, in other words, imitation triumphs. 
• A negative mimetic cycle is disrupted when two people, through empathy, stop seing each other as rivals.
• The em - in empathy means "to go into". It's the ability to go into the experiences or feelings of another person, but without losing self-possession, or the ability to maintain control over our responses and to act freely, out of our own core.
• Empathy means finding a shared point of humanity through which to connect without sacrificing our integrity in the process.
• A person who is able to empathize can enter the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires.
• Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives.
• The desire to retire is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do, or not do, in this ideal state. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is thick desire.
• Peuple seeking professional prestige, respect or admiration for their talents, without realizing that the pursuit of prestige is the pursuit of Fata Morgana.
• Tell me about a time in your life when you did something well and it brought you a sense of fulfillment.
• The interior dimension of an action: What was the person's motivation for taking it? What were the circumstances? How did the action affect them on an emotional level?
• MASTER: a person motivated to MASTER wants to gain complete command of a skill, subject, procedure, technique or process.
• COMPREHEND AND EXPRESS: a person with this core drive wants to understand, define, and then communicate their insights in some way.
• If she reads a book, she is compelled to review it on her blog.
• Serving other people, contributing to the success of the team, fighting injustice, organizing an effort that serves the common good.

Transcendent Leadership

• Desires don't magically and spontaneously happen. They are generated and shaped in the dynamic world of human interaction. Someone has to supply a model.
• Transcendent leaders have models of desire outside the systems they are in. The greatest writers and artists in history were driven by them, and that's why their work are timeless. They were not confined to the popular desires of their age.
• Shift gravity.
• They wanted to grow up, carve out their place in the world, grow in dignity.
• The speed of truth.
• In times of crisis, the threat from inside a company is underestimated. People who don't want to take  responsibility find scapegoats.
• The health of any human project that relies on the ability to adapt depends on the speed at which truth travels.
• Discernment
• We're not always as rational as we think. Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler have demonstrated how easily we can be deceived.
• Sit quietly in a room.
• "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" Blaise Pascal.
• Invest in deep silence
• Filter feedback
• The MVP is "that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort".
• It's politics by polling, in which a candidate does whatever the polls tell them to do.

The mimetic future

• The model that we adopt for the future is critical to the formation of our desires.
• What we will want in the future depends on three things: how desire was formed in the past, how it is formed in the present, and how it will be formed in the future.
• Facebook is an endless stream of models in the form of other people's curated lives.
• The internet, despite creating enormous economic value by connecting the world, accelerated mimetic rivalry and diverted attention from innovation in others areas.
• But I can't help but think that the proliferation of these shows, thousands of them, with cooking competitions looping non-stop on twenty-four-hour food channels is symptomatic of our cultural stagnation and decadence.
• Google is like a deity that answers our questions. Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging. Amazon fulfills the need for security, allowing us instantaneous access to goods in abundance. Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one's attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own.
• We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system.
• Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible.
• "Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy" George Gilder. 
• Ideologies are closed systems of desire.
• Wise people have said that it is best to compare to yourself only to who you were yesterday, not to who other people are today.
• People's desires are artificially shaped by external forces.
• Sometimes the market isn't a good indication of what people want. It's good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.
• We must make a decision about what it is that is worth sinking our teeth into.
• The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfillment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfillment of others.

Afterword

• Life is a process of ever-evolving desire.
• "Extremistan", "Mediocristan", "Celebristan", "Freshmanistan"
• "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind". René Girard.

Motivational Themes

• Top three core motivational themes
• I trained and competed in a marathon.
• EXCEL: Maybe you compete against yourself in efforts that test your limits and stimulate you to stretch yourself to develop your skills. You want to establish a reputation that confirms the excellence of your work. In general, you want to do better than others, for example, to be the fastest or most effective.
• OVERCOME: You are motivated to struggle with the factors working against you until you overcome them.
• MASTER: Your motivation is satisfied when you are able to gain complete command of a skill, subject, procedure, technique, or process. It could be that you concentrate on the principles behind an engineering problem. Your thinking and talents are oriented toward mastery, your goals toward perfection.
• Susan Blackmore, an expert of meme theory and author of "The Meme Machine" is explicit about the role of imitation.

The Blocksize war - Jonathan Bier

 

• The dream of a world where ordinary people have ultimate and direct control over the rules that govern their money.

First Strike

• Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen.
• Bitcoiners were typically anarcho-capitalists or libertarians who strongly supported free speech.
• People tend to like reading things they agree with and follow people they agree with. Confirmation bias features heavily on social media platforms and causes polarization.

March To War

• This type of upgrade was called a softfork, i.e. a new rule tightening restrictions on block validity. It is a softfork because adding or lowering the limit tightens the rules. Increasing the limit would relax the rules and is therefore known as a hardfork.

Scaling I - Montréal

• The company appeared to be perpetually worried about the risk of high inflation, driven by monetary easing from central bankers and the prospect of large fiscal deficits.
• There was no real distinction between validating nodes and mining nodes.

Scaling II- Hong Kong

• The same was said about the French insurer AXA, whose venture arm also invested in Blockstream. The former CEO of AXA was Henri de Castries, chairman of the steering group for the Bildeberg meeting, a close-door gathering of the world's financial and political elites, which provided perfect material for conspiracy theorists.
• Proof of work was there to solve the double spending problem.
• Roger Ver backing companies such as Blockchain.info, Bit pay and Kraken.

SegWit

• SegWit is a way of increasing the Bitcoin block size, without the new client being incompatible (I.e. it was soft fork rather than a hard fork ). A Bitcoin transaction consists of various components, one of which is the signature, authorizing the spend. This signature is typically the largest part of the transaction, based on the amount of data. SegWit was a new transaction format, where the signature would not need to be included in the old block, which still had a 1MB limit.
• Bitcoin is more than just engineering and computer science. It is also a social system, a live payment system, an economic system, and a financial system.

Lightning Network

• Lightning essentially works by aggregating multiple payments into a smaller number of Bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin transactions are used to open payment channels, which, once set up, facilitate a flow of multiple payments. Entities can have channels with many different counterparts, forming a network of channels. Payments can then find a path along the channels, which are already connected to each other, until they reach the final recipient.
• To some of the small blockers, this layer-two architecture made much more sense for a high capacity and cheap global payment system. On-chain, blockchain-based payment system typically work in a "broadcast to everyone" mode, in that when one make a payment, one needs to broadcast the transaction to all participants network. All participants are then required to process this transaction to see if it's a payment to them. This system is considered highly inefficient, especially for small payments. If someone is buys a coffee in France using Bitcoin, why should a merchant selling concert tickets in Japan needs to examine the transaction? That is essentially how on-chain Bitcoin payments worked and, to small blockers, the architecture made little sense for small payments; it was only needed as a base layer of a monetary system.
• Instead of broadcasting a transaction to everyone, the transaction can be send more directly to the payment recipient, more of a peer-to-peer architecture. If one of the parties to the transaction is dishonest and tries to steal money, then the other party can broadcast a transaction to the Bitcoin blockchain and reclaims the funds. The blockchain, and Bitcoin's proof-of-work consensus mechanism, is therefore used as a dispute resolution service. When both parties are honest, the nuances, inefficiencies and scalability constraints of the proof-of-work process can be avoided.
• Large blockers could claim, with some legitimacy, that the small blockers were highly intelligent computer geeks biased towards complex, technically elegant, but impractical solutions.
• At the time of writing, although the lightning network is gaining traction and the technology is rapidly improving, merchant adoption of the lightning network is limited.

The DAO

• In the summer of 2016, a project called the "DAO" (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) began to grab the attention of many inside the cryptocurrency community. The DAO was a smart contract built on Ethereum and styled itself as a kind of autonomous investment fund. Rather than the stodgy (lourd), old top-down-managed investment funds, the DAO would make investments as determined by votes from its users and would be governed by the code in the smart contract, rather than the law.
• The opportunity to make money was the primary driver of this trend. The success of Ethereum had driven a wave of copycats and new coin offerings.

Exchanges

• The most significant change was the emergence and growth of several cryptocurrency exchange businesses, whose success was driven by considerable demand from the retail market in the Asia Pacific region. Companies such as Poloinex, BitMEX and, perhaps most significantly of all, Bitfinex.

ASICBoost

• ASICBoost is a way to reduce the amount of work a miner is required to do when making a hashing attempt for Bitcoin's proof of work (PoW). SHA256, which is the hashing algorithm used for Bitcoin's PoW, splits the block header into 64-byte chunks before the computation occurs.
• As of today, more than 70% of Bitcoin blocks are mined using overt (déclaré) ASICBoost.

Dragons'Den

• The co-author of the lightning white paper, Joseph Poon.
• Bram Cohen, the inventor of Bittorrent.

Litecoin

• Unlike Bitcoin, which had a 95% activation threshold, Litecoin had a 75% miner activation threshold. Litecoin had the same two week rolling activation windows, followed by a two-week grace period.
• UASF: User Activated Soft Fork.
• This was clearly a good start to 2017 for the small blockers. They had achieved three victories in a row: exchanges, ASICBoost and now Litecoin.

User-Activated Softfork

• Segwit increases the block size, fixes transaction malleability, and makes scripting easier to upgrade as well as many other benefits.
• "Bitcoin is valuable in part because it has high security and stability; segwit was carefully designed to support and amplify that engineering integrity that people can count now and in the future." "First do no harm". Gregory Maxwell.

New-York agreement

• There are two group of people which have two different visions for Bitcoin. None of these visions is "wrong". One group values more things like decentralization, lack of government, censorship resistance, anonymity. This group thinks that Bitcoin will transform our world in 20-30 years. To reach this goal, it's of utter importance to stick to those values. There is no rush. The other group values more things like reaching one billion users in the next 5 years, or serving real unbanked users today, even if that requires a political agreement now.

Bitcoin cash

• The new alternative would exclude SegWit.

SegWit2x

• Most people just wanted to be on the winning side.
• The large blockers never really supported SegWit2x, their hearts went to Bitcoin Cash.

Victory

• Bitcoin remains the greatest form of money mankind has ever seen, and we remain dedicated to protecting and fostering its growth worldwide.
• It was now, finally, widely accepted that arranging meetings with large corporates in the space and trying to decide on changes to the protocol rules would not work.
• End users always control Bitcoin.
• Over this two-year battle, the small blockers and users had overcome the miners and the large businesses in the space, and, despite their large blocker adversaries investing literally hundred of millions of dollars into the cause, the small blockers won an incredible and resounding victory. Bitcoin demonstrated that it could be the user-controlled money, that it was always meant to be.