A dictionary of how hard it is to get true knowledge – biases and more.
F – Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes (2010) “Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit”
B – Brandolini’s Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle (2013): “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
C – … Predictions, like advice, often tell you more about the person giving them than about the world.
D – Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind.
The SEC introduced certain short-selling disclosure requirements including publication of those on EDGAR that went effective 2nd of January 2025 (full details here).
The first batch of form SHOs are to be submitted 14 days after the end of the calendar month and published at the end of February.
“Every year, the SEC spends ~$14 million responding to 10,000+ FOIA requests. If the SEC responds to a FOIA request with a B7A exemption, that indicates the subject company is likely under an undisclosed SEC investigation, which is “associated with significant negative future abnormal returns.”
“With FOIAsearch.com, you can easily find all past FOIA requests on a company and B7A investigation exemptions in a single search.“
“Both Huang’s aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen’s parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy’s tuition […]
“[He] was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a “17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,” how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky “more vividly than just about any other”
Some people have the most fascinating backgrounds.
The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury lived an interesting life. His mother was Churchill’s personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill’s other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn’t learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest. He says he can speak in tongues – “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline – you choose to speak and you speak a language that you don’t know, it just comes” – and has written a book called “Can Companies Sin?”. He lost his archbishop position last month for the most stereotypical possible reason – failed to investigate sex abuse by a church leader who was a friend of his.
North American LNG export capacity is about to see another surge over the next 3-5 years as new projects come online.
“North America’s liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity is on track to more than double between 2024 and 2028, from 11.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2023 to 24.4 Bcf/d in 2028, if projects currently under construction begin operations as planned.“
For stock investing it could be an interesting addition to start to dissect a single price that captures everything about a company into individual events/risks – from the macro to the micro (CEO change for example).
This gives investors more granularity and a way to manage risks.
Want a guide to what happened in the world of ecommerce in 2024? Read here.
The most fascinating development continues to be a move from made in China, to sold by China to now, with the rise of Temu and Shein, promoted by China.
Retail media has taken over from traditional TV in terms of advertising dollars.
“OpenAI’s new o3 system – trained on the ARC-AGI-1 Public Training set – has scored a breakthrough 75.7% on the Semi-Private Evaluation set at our stated public leaderboard $10k compute limit. A high-compute (172x) o3 configuration scored 87.5%.“
“This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models. For context, ARC-AGI-1 took 4 years to go from 0% with GPT-3 in 2020 to 5% in 2024 with GPT-4o. All intuition about AI capabilities will need to get updated for o3.“
