The Inside Scoop « Isegoria

The Inside Scoop

Thursday, May 13th, 2004

The Washington Post‘s Inside Scoop suggests investing in the worst-rated stocks:

In a recent issue of Growth Stock Outlook, Charles Allmon points out that last year the poorly rated stocks of many research services outperformed their highly rated stocks. For example, Standard & Poor’s one-star stocks returned 57 percent while its five-star stocks returned 43 percent. Merrill Lynch’s sell-rated stocks returned 46 percent while its buy-rated stocks returned 30 percent. Schwab’s F-rated stocks returned 70 percent while its A-rated stocks returned 66 percent. The biggest discrepancy came with Value Line, whose 5-rated stocks (the 100 companies with, supposedly, the worst prospects for the year ahead) returned an incredible 90 percent while the 1-rated stocks (the top prospects) returned 40 percent.

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Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...
Isegoria: Excellent example, Bob. I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
Bob Sykes: I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...
Phileas Frogg: Caplan is one of the most hit/miss popular academics today. He goes from cogently and insightfully detailing the flaws and issues with a complex system or behavior, to proposing the most obviously asinine and unworkable solutions imaginable to anyone with practical experience in that field, to slipping a totally original and unlooked for consideration into the mix that gives you pause, all within the span of a small handful of pages, only to do it again a few pages later. Reading Caplan...
Bob Sykes: One argument in favor of Emily et al is social cohesion and group self-identification, national-building. Caplan seems to think humans are identical, interchangeable atoms, without history or culture. Or is he just furthering the usual sabotage of the surrounding, somewhat alien, culture in which he is embeddded
David Foster: “The great 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, in The Poetics of Music, “You cannot create against a yielding medium.” Stravinsky’s innovations were nothing if not revolutionary, but he knew that he could not have produced them if he had not been constrained by the traditions of music and the mathematical strictures of tone. “Let me have something finite, definite,” he wrote. “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the...
Jim: “They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?” That’s the worst imaginable environment for engineers, who invariably need to be held down and whipped with soapful socks like Private Pyle at boot camp.
Jim: Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to...
Isegoria: That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas. I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.
Phileas Frogg: Looking forward to reading more excerpts, I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Sports Gene,” so much so that I went and bought a copy a few years ago. I expect some similarly provocative and interesting fodder from this one. On the topic of the book, whenever I was struggling to write a drum part for the band I played for in college, I would begin systematically taking pieces of my kit away until I developed something that worked, and then slowly add pieces back in. Limiting myself...
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Then we are substantially in agreement, our only meaningful divergence being that I reflexively view utility from the perspective of the world-controllers, as opposed to from the citizen-subjects. The major difference, then, is not moral righteousness or justice or other such thing, but the habitual understanding that the perpetuation of a system, any system, is owing, ultimately, to the perspective of its managers, formal or informal, that the purpose of a system is what it does…and...
Jim: Free men do not live subject to video surveillance or electronically locked buildings.
Bob Sykes: If you want a career in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, or the sciences, an accredited degree is mandatory. The days when you could just sit in the back of the room and listen ended long ago, even for state schools. At most schools, private and public, key cards of some sort are needed to get into most buildings, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.
Isegoria: Wow, times have changed! The recent Brown University shooting footage revealed that security cameras are common now, but the idea of locking a college down is really foreign to me.
Gaikokumaniakku: Historical perspective: Although the doctrine that the sea by its nature must be free to all was eventually upheld, most commentators did recognize that, as a practical matter, a coastal state needed to exercise some jurisdiction in the waters adjacent to its shores. Two different concepts developed—that the area of jurisdiction should be limited to cannon-shot range, and that the area should be a much greater belt of uniform width adjacent to the coast—and in the late 18th century these...
Gaikokumaniakku: Middle-aged people can wonder whether they will live long enough to see the collapse of the AIPAC-USA-Epstein coalition. Meanwhile, even if the coalition is ultimately doomed, it is still effective enough to drag out the war in Iran and Lebanon.
Gaikokumaniakku: “We can’t just wish or manifest our way to crazy performance, despite what some in the self-help world may say.” Magness has a tendency to generalize too far from very limited evidence. If wishing/manifestation always worked like Aladdin’s Lamp, of course we would see everyone re-making the world into their own versions of the Arabian Nights. Conversely, if mainstream scholars were honest about paranormal topics, Steve Magness would not have a “performance coaching”...
Dan Kurt: Fellow classmate from Ivy during 1960s contacted me to say he was shocked, shocked to discover on visiting the campus EVERYTHING was locked down, security was obvious, and cameras watched over all. As to the schooling, he told me that the number of lectures given to students had decreased substantially per course since our time there.
Handle: Colleges do card now. The last five campuses I’ve been to all had many buildings with secure entry that require tapping student or staff identity cards on some RFID sensor panel to disengage the automatic lock on the doors. Even state schools that explicitly provide free “audit” access to classes for certain groups like the elderly still require more than the professor’s mere permission and one must apply for to get one of those IDs and, as I understand it, there is some...

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