The economy collapsed when Lehman Bros. went bankrupt on September 15, 2008. Joe Wiesenthal of Clusterstock has now brought to the public's attention the real villain behind the economic crash. On p. 120 of Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big to Fail, in a discussion of Lehman's president Joseph Gregory:
He loved being the in-house philosopher-king, an evangelist on the subject of workplace diversity and a devotee of the theories described in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink. He gave out copies of the book and had even hired the author to lecture employees on trusting their instincts when making difficult decisions. In an industry based on analyzing raw data, Gregory was defiantly a gut man.
Now that I think about it, I realize I always had a gut feeling that this global crash was, somehow, all Malcolm's fault. It just had to be. If only I'd trusted my instincts, like he told me to in Blink ... Imagine how much money I could have made shorting the stocks of companies that had paid Malcolm to make speeches to their employees!
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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15 comments:
Not too late to find companies like that to short, if you know where to look.
Steve, that was very funny.
"If only I'd trusted my instincts, like he told me to in Blink"
I thought the whole point of Blink was DON'T trust your instincts, ESPECIALLY in the context of race and especially if you see a vaguely biracial guy with an upturned pseudo-afro driving down a freeway.
Steve, you keep sniping at poor Malcolm like he's some kind of competitor. It's not as if the man seriously tries to think, he's just a New York social climber with a high IQ, whose mingling strategy sometimes requires him to emit words that appear pertinent to your own favorite subjects.
For whatever it's worth, when I took the IAT, it concluded, "Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Black relative to White."
Same with me.
This fits a personal hypothesis of mine that the anti race realism crowd is slightly racist. They have to work hard at not disliking blacks, so they try to protect their minds from hate facts, much like the homophobic crowd suspiciously talks about homosexuality as if it
were some kind of temptation that one has to resist.
Very droll, Steve.
I don't know if this would work, but you might try growing a pseudo-Jewfro and do a Napoleon Dynamite imitation of Gladwell.
A cheap shot. And a damn entertaining one too. Hell, I bet Gladwell laughs too when he sees this.
Philosopher-kings are pretty dumbed-down now, huh?
Steve, you keep sniping at poor Malcolm like he's some kind of competitor.
They are competing for finite resources in the nonfiction socio-cultural wiseman ecological niche.
And Mr. Gladwell makes many more $ than Steve. M. G.'s bringing home lots more bacon or its appropriate kosher substitute, and putting lots more food on his family, as G. Bush Jr. might say.
So whose descendants will prevail and who's the Neanderthal loser, huh huh huh? :0) !
I liked most of Blink but noticed he was forced into some mental gymnastics to maintain political correctness, and ended up contradicting himself.
Gladwell said that when Coca-Cola designed New Coke, they made the mistake of relying on raw data from blind taste-tests. When they put the product into the field, it failed because they did not realize (or forgot) that drinking a can of Coke is a sensory experience that goes beyond taste - seeing the can, opening the can, etc. are all part of the overall experience, and they ruined it when they changed the label. His point was that the Coke people used tunnel vision in relying on data to make what should have been an intuitive and wholistic decision. Their taste-tests would have been valid only if all soft drinks were sold in identical, unmarked cans.
On the other hand, he says that orchestras were reluctant to hire female musicians, until they started using "blind" auditions, where the musician is behind a screen, and the auditors do not know who s/he is. Under these rules (and perhaps some Affirmative Action pressure) orchestras began hiring more women.
But if you can't choose a soft drink that way, how can you choose a musician that way? Maybe the audiences like seeing men in the orchestra.
Gladwell bent over backwards. He is not the first nor will he be the last.
Steve, since this post has now at least partly veered off into the race/crime area, you might be interested in a kind of "Bonfire of Vanities" story from today's SF Chronicle. Two black girls, seemingly over 18, demanded to buy a discount pass from a Muni employee, who asked for ID. They went berserk, tried to enter his "cage" and hurled soda cans at him or it. He ended up punching one of them in the mouth, and is now in custody (bail 53K), charged with a felony. A witness is quoted as saying the girls should have been the ones arrested. As you may know, black yoof are now so used to getting things free that it seems "unfair" to actually have to qualify for a discount. It'll be interesting to see if the DA's office thinks it can get a conviction on this before a (presumably) majority Asian jury.
Not too late to find companies like that to short, if you know where to look.
After reading about Goldman's hijinks in the last year [e.g. here/here/here/here/here and here and, of course, here/here/here, etc], I am now toying with the idea, that, ah, certain "folks" in our society deliberately promote these insane leftist social policies precisely so as to be able to short them when they inevitably fail.
In private correspondence, I've been trying to get Steve & others interested in the idea that the global warming hoax is being created so that these same ah, "folks" [say, for example, people who might or might not be blood relatives of Al Gore's old mentor, Marty Peretz] can become billionaires when they short the insanity of "Green" energy.
Cf a certain ex-chairman of the SUNY-SB mathematics department and his pals - no one could possibly have earned any money in 2008 unless they were massively shorting all of that CRA/Redlining/HUD/Fannie/Freddie nonsense [which none of us out here in flyover country were even aware of at the time].
And then, of course, when it was all over, they still needed AIG to rescue their chestnuts from the fire so as to be able to realize their big payday.
[In all honesty, I think that that's probably why they sabotaged the McCain campaign - in addition to all their other reasons for preferring Obama, I imagine that they feared that McCain was enough of a cantankerous old koot to possibly forbid the government to save them via AIG.]
And, of course, it's only AIG who is on the receiving end of their publicly-expressed ire.
I'll continue to trust my gut, which tells me in no uncertain terms to not bother with Malcolm Gladwell's books...
So whose descendants will prevail and who's the Neanderthal loser, huh huh huh? :0) !
Gladwell is currently, as far as I can tell, without progeny. So Steve is winning that Darwinian struggle.
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