Sublime

2. Performance management

One of the most famous figures to illustrate this skill is the mathematician Abraham Wald (Mangel and Samaniego 1984). During World War II, he was asked to help the Royal Air Force find the areas on their planes that were most often hit by bullets so they could cover them with more armour. But instead of counting the bullet holes on the returned pl

Un homme, une voix. La grande majorité est comme Hitler, elle a eu pour école la rue. » Alfred se risque un peu plus avant. « Je crois cependant que la supériorité de l’Allemagne émane de nos grands esprits – Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Leibniz. Non ? — C’est précisément la raison pour laquelle je vous ai demandé de rester. Il lui faut… comment

As Isaac Newton put it, after losing a fortune in the South Seas stock bubble: “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”

For these reasons, prices may pass statistical tests for randomness, but they are not themselves random (although it is plausible that their randomness is random, and that randomness is random, and so on) but rather are unpredictable on the basis of market data alone. They are, however, predictable to the extent that the predictor accurately assess

history is littered with the corpses of those who from known facts have deduced wrongful – and occasionally disastrous – conclusions.

MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS

The act of measuring certain sensitive variables in a system can alter them, and confound the accuracy of the measurement.