John P. Faris III

Things I'm Working On

Monthly Memo

Major Rudolf Anderson, Placebos and Incentives

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The next paragraph is something I’m thankful for…

A Local Hero

On October 27, 1962, Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. took off in a U-2F from McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, Florida.   A few hours into his mission, he was shot down by a surface-to-air missile near Banes, Cuba.  Anderson was the only casualty by enemy fire during the Cuban missile crisis.  He was born and raised in Greenville, SC and earned the rank of Eagle Scout from Boy Scout Troop 19. He graduated from Greenville High School and earned a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University in 1948. Major Anderson played a very large role in our country’s history.  Here’s GVL Today:

“So how did his death potentially save millions of lives? Anderson’s death made leaders on both sides realize that the crisis was “rapidly spiraling out of their control.” Unless they wanted a nuclear war, they had to end it.

The story as we all know it ends with “a top-secret deal” and a peaceful end to the thirteen-day standoff. Without Major Rudolf Anderson, things could have ended much differently.

Anderson is now buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park, and Cleveland Park features his memorial to remind us that it was a Greenvillian who potentially saved us all from a devastating nuclear war.”

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Placebos

I think I was in high school when I first heard about placebos during a psychology class.  The idea that the mind could be “tricked” by an inert tablet like a sugar pill is fascinating.

From the Atlantic’s book summary of The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative Medicine and the Surprising Power of Belief, by Melanie Warner

“Henry Beecher was a professor at Harvard who joined the U.S. Army during World War II and served as a doctor on battlefields in Italy. There, in makeshift field hospitals, he saw countless soldiers arrive with broken bones jutting through the skin, lacerations, and assorted “penetrating wounds.” Despite their trauma, three-quarters of them reported only slight to moderate pain, or none at all. Back home, where Beecher worked as the chief anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, he’d seen civilians with similarly severe injuries display far greater levels of distress. Intrigued by this discrepancy, Beecher reviewed his data and found that 83 percent of civilians requested pain relief upon arriving at the hospital, whereas only 32 percent of soldiers did.”

Beecher thought the soldiers may have perceived the hospital as their “ticket to safety”.

“Beecher found himself considering the possibility that anytime he gave painkillers, part of the resulting relief was not from the drugs themselves, but from the patients’ conviction that they were going to feel better. Compelled by this logic, he set up the first program to study placebo effects and in 1955 published “The Powerful Placebo.” He reported that in a sample of more than 1,000 patients, placebos relieved the symptoms (not only pain) of a full 35 percent.” (The Atlantic)

But it gets even better…

Here’s Tom Whitwell in his post 52 Things I learned in 2019:

“Placebos are so effective that placebo placebos work: A pain cream with no active ingredients worked even whennot used by the patient. Just owning the cream was enough to reduce pain. [Victoria Wai-lanYeung]”

Amazing!

Ever been prescribed Obecalp?

“Obecalp is a real placebo; nothing more than an inert powder stuffed in a colorful capsule, a sugar pill. As a matter of fact, Obecalp is placebo spelled backwards, and all pharmacists who get a prescription for it will know what to do. The name “placebo” comes from the Latin word meaning ‘to please’.” (Web MD Blog)

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Incentives

The link between incentives and behavior is undeniable.  Next year I plan on writing a longer piece about this. Here’s a great example…

From Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It by Matthew Ball (H/T Ben Evans):

“Engagement-based monetization is arguably more fair. Consider, for example, that the Beatles’ Yesterday and Psy’s Gangnam Style would each generate $1 when sold on iTunes, even if the former was played 2,000 times over ten years and the latter 30 times in the month it was bought and then never again. But the more that business models change, the more that incentives and content change, too.

To support engagement-based monetization, Spotify and its label suppliers had to define engagement. And they chose to do this on a per stream basis with a minimum stream time of 30 seconds (to avoid accidental plays, track skipping, etc.). However, this meant that a 10-minute track, five-minute track and 31-second track generated the same royalties. 

So as the music industry has transitioned the majority of its revenues from CDs and downloads to streaming, major artists have relentlessly shortened and split their tracks. Why release a five-minute song if you can make it a two and a half-minute song that’s played twice? Or two different two and a half-minute songs? This meant artists had yet another reason to reduce track lengths”

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Amelia Earhart, Tail Events and Forest Bathing

A Quick Announcement

Many of you are also subscribers to my email newsletter GSP Updates. You may have noticed you haven’t received an email since February 2020.  I’ve put that project on hold and I’m devoting more attention to the Monthly Memo.  In the meantime, I may try incorporating a bit of local content here.

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Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, the first female pilot to fly trans-Atlantic, visited Spartanburg in 1931 and spoke at Converse College.  While that’s notable, I found her mode of transportation even more interesting. She flew into the downtown airport in a helicopter-airplane hybrid called an autogiro. Here are some pictures of this unusual aircraft.

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Tail Events

“The world is driven by tail events. A minority of things drive the majority of outcomes. It’s one of the most important concepts in investing, where a few positions may account for most of your lifetime returns.

History is no different. World War II, World War I, and the Great Depression influenced nearly every important event of the 20th century. Industrialization and the Civil War did the same in the 19th.

Demographics, inequality, and information access will have a huge impact on the coming decades. How those Big Things end is a story yet to be told. But when it’s told we’ll have a better idea of where it began.” (Morgan Housel via Collaborative Fund)

It’s worth mentioning that this prescient piece was written by Housel in Oct 2019.  I can’t help but wonder if we’re currently living a tail event.

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Doing the Hard Work

“…you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. No one responds well to having their identity attacked. No argument made in bad faith—that the person on the other side is a moron or a dupe or a racist or a snowflake—is ever going to be received in good faith.

Reason is easy. Being clever is easy. Humiliating someone in the wrong is easy too. But putting yourself in their shoes, kindly nudging them to where they need to be, understanding that they have emotional and irrational beliefs just like you have emotional and irrational beliefs—that’s all much harder. So is not writing off other people. So is spending time working on the plank in your own eye than the splinter in theirs. We know we wouldn’t respond to someone talking to us that way, but we seem to think it’s okay to do it to other people.” – Ryan Holiday from his post It’s Not Enough to Be Right—You Also Have to Be Kind

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Detachment

Several months ago I started reading Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors.  The book is an account of a season spent in one of the last fire lookout towers in the West.  Here’s a passage from the beginning of the book…

“Not many people I know have to work this hard to get to work, yet I can honestly say I love the hike, every step of it. The pain is a toll I willingly pay on my way to the top, for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.”

The words “detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again” stuck with me.

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Forest Bathing

Many of us have spent more time outdoors this year.  I learned a new term – “Forest Bathing”…

“In Japan, we practice something called forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku. Shinrin in Japanese means “forest,” and yoku means “bath.” So shinrin-yoku means bathing in the forest atmosphere, or taking in the forest through our senses…This is not exercise, or hiking, or jogging. It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Shinrin-yoku is like a bridge. By opening our senses, it bridges the gap between us and the natural world.”  (Time Magazine)

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Peace

Summer is ending and I find myself thinking about Paul Graham’s post on having children.  I especially like this passage:

“What I didn’t notice, because they tend to be much quieter, were all the great moments parents had with kids. People don’t talk about these much — the magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about them anyway — but one of the great things about having kids is that there are so many times when you feel there is nowhere else you’d rather be, and nothing else you’d rather be doing. You don’t have to be doing anything special. You could just be going somewhere together, or putting them to bed, or pushing them on the swings at the park. But you wouldn’t trade these moments for anything. One doesn’t tend to associate kids with peace, but that’s what you feel. You don’t need to look any further than where you are right now….Before I had kids, I had moments of this kind of peace, but they were rarer. With kids it can happen several times a day.”

Summer always presents a few more opportunities for these special moments. With all that is happening around us, I find these times even more meaningful.

Nevertheless, I always welcome the Fall and the cooler weather it brings.

Jefferson, Adams and Independence Day

Independence

It’s a story so coincidental, it’s almost unbelievable…

On July 4, 1826, at the age of 90, Adams lay on his deathbed while the country celebrated Independence Day. His last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” He was mistaken: Jefferson had died five hours earlier at Monticello at the age of 83.

Two former Presidents of the United States, “the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies“, die within hours of one another on the day representative of the cause to which they devoted their lives. (History.com)

I learned this while watching the excellent John Adams miniseries. 

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Forgiveness

As Seneca wrote, “Let’s be kind to one another. We’re just wicked people living among wicked people. Only one thing can give us peace, and that’s a pact of mutual leniency.” 

(Daily Stoic, We Need Forgiveness)

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Changing Norms

The ancient Romans filled their capital with more than 1,000 public baths. Those privies weren’t remotely private. They “generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus,” Bill Bryson writes in his history of the modern house, At Home.

This type of bath went out of style in Europe for almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, thanks in part to Dark Age scientists’ developing the very unscientific idea that bathing in water invites a host of awful diseases into the body’s pores. For most of the Middle Ages, “most [European] people didn’t wash, or even get wet, if they could help it,” Bryson writes. When John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, declared that “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” in a 1778 sermon, he was talking about our garments, not our armpits. (The Atlantic)

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Unlikely Agreement

(Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made…

The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.

(Phys.org, H/T David Perell – Monday Musing 10/21/19)

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Access and Ownership

New technology generally reorganizes our consumption away from ownership and towards access. 100 years ago, music came from a piano, then it came from the record store, and now it comes from Spotify. 100 years ago, food came from a farm, then it came for a grocery store, and now it comes from DoorDash. There’s no denying that this is forward progress for the consumer. You would not want to go backwards. But there’s a cost. The more you can access, the less it’s yours. (Alex Danco, Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours)

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A New American Journey

“This was the fabled South Pass that the fur trappers had used since the 1820s. The pass, the benign opening in the Rockies that made the trail west possible, marks the Continental Divide, separating the drainages of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The views west from South Pass are spectacular. Vast sagebrush lands, rimmed by the foothills along the western face of the Rockies, stretch toward the rendezvous country along the Green River. Narcissa and Eliza paused at the top to rest their horses and wait for the wagon and the pack train, staring off toward the capacious vistas of the Green. It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.”

— The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck

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Earth and Heaven

“There is only one thing in this world which is worth dedicating all your life. This is creating more love among people and destroying barriers which exist between them.”

Leo Tolstoy

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On a Sunday morning in October of 1967, a crowd of five thousand gathered in the gymnasium of Grinnell College in Iowa.  Among those in attendance was 37 year-old Warren Buffett and his wife Susie. Anne Schroeder, in her biography of Buffett writes, “Finally King strode to the podium, dressed in his preacher’s robes. He had chosen the theme of “Remaining Awake During a Revolution,” and his resonant voice rang out with a quote from poet James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis,” the anthem of the civil-rights movement.

Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne:
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow
Keeping watch above His own.”

James Russell Lowell

…“One of his lines, which he repeated in many of his speeches, struck Buffett’s heart and pierced his reason. “The laws are not to change the heart,” he said, “but to restrain the heartless.””

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

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Read more about the sermon in this 2008 NY Times Opinion piece by Taylor Branch.  If you’re short on time find the paragraph that begins:
“What Dr. King prescribed in his last Sunday sermon begins with the story of Lazarus and Dives, from the 16th chapter of Luke. Told entirely from the mouth of Jesus, it is a story starring Abraham the patriarch of Judaism, set in the afterlife. There’s nothing else like it in the Bible.”

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The following is from David Perell’s weekly newsletter, Monday Musings, from December 16, 2019:

The Apollo program wouldn’t have happened without the involvement of 400,000 people and 20,000 companies. In an oral history, Neil Armstrong talked about how the team worked together to solve design, manufacturing, and human errors.

Here’s Armstrong:

“Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and by far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.”
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I’ll leave you with the final stanza of The Present Crisis by James Russell Lowell:

“New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;        
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;    
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,          
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.”

James Russell Lowell

 

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Freedom and Forgiveness

Ponte du Hoc

On the morning of June 6, 1944 about 225 United States Army Rangers crossed the English Channel in British landing craft. Their destination was Ponte du Hoc, France – a cliff rising 100 feet above the sea, positioned between Omaha and Utah beach. Their mission was to climb the 10-story earth wall using ropes, ladders, and grapples while being fired upon by the enemy, and take control of the German position at the top. The purpose was to disable six large guns that would threaten the allied landings nearby. The mission was a success, but the story takes a few turns and has a surprise ending.

I discovered this fascinating bit of history through the 2019 documentary, “D-Day at Pointe-du-Hoc”.

Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, who led the Rangers, later sent a condolence letter to the mother of Corporal Willis Caperton. Here are a few of his moving words:

“The Day of Invasion found these men ready, fully trained, fully equipped not only physically but mentally. On the day before they came to France, men of all Faiths had gathered with the Chaplain and dedicated the work at hand to God and their individual part in it as subject to HIs Holy Will.

The mission of the Rangers was successfully accomplished but as with all worthwhile things, the cost was great, so great indeed, that it cost the life you cherished and lost us a comrade and a friend. A Country must be great to call for the sacrifice of such men but America will always be great just because such men have fallen in order that the principles expressed in our Constitution might endure.”

Forgiveness

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

― Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

Problem Solving

“Hard science can permanently solve problems. In 1902 we couldn’t fly. Now we can because we found the solution, and that solution will be as valid 1,000 years from now as it is today.


Social problems – everything from relationships to the stock market – are different. Social solutions have shelf lives, limited applicability, and affect people differently.”

(Death, Taxes, and Three Other Inevitable Things by Morgan Housel)

Productivity

“Small increases in productivity have a huge long-term impact. From Nick Bostrom:

‘Imagine a tool was invented to help a researcher to improve by just 1%.

The gain would hardly be noticeable in a single individual. But if the 10 million scientists in the world all benefited from the tool, the inventor would increase the rate of scientific progress by roughly the same amount as adding 100,000 new scientists.

Each year the invention would amount to an indirect contribution equal to 100,000 times what the average scientist contributes.’ (David Perell)

Overconfidence

Jason Zweig is a financial writer for the WSJ. Last year Zwieg penned this entertaining autobiographical piece urging the reader (and himself) to avoid a recurring mistake of his past. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

“To say that these episodes cured me of overconfidence would be an absurd lie. More than four decades later, I still regularly commit the same blunder of presuming I know more than I do, more than the people around me, more than the people who came before me, more than the people who have spent decades studying a topic or working in a field. I underestimate the difficulty of problems and overestimate the ease of solutions. I assume reality is simpler than a lifetime of encountering complications should already have taught me it must be.”

And this from the same post…

“I love saying ‘I don’t know,’ but I don’t love it nearly as much as I should; just as water is the universal solvent, “I don’t know” should be our universal first response to nearly every hard question.” –  Jason Zweig (H/T Nick Maggiulli)

Kinship

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease—the life force found in mother’s milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: “My sibling from the same canoe”; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin…

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. (The Atlantic)

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