Lone Gunman

In Intel­li­gent Life’s review of Sweet Thun­der, a Sugar Ray Robin­son biog­ra­phy, they dis­cuss Sugar Ray’s entre­pre­neur­ial spirit and tenac­ity in keep­ing con­trol over his own busi­ness and brand.

Robin­son was savvy. He was the first black ath­lete to own most of the rights to his fights and to nego­ti­ate broad­cast­ing deals on radio and tele­vi­sion. […] Robin­son would reg­u­larly raise the issue of com­pen­sa­tion with pro­mot­ers only after tick­ets had been sold, when call­ing off a fight was not a pos­si­bil­ity. He would also only agree to fight if mob­sters weren’t involved. Once he was paid, he spent lav­ishly on fine clothes, fancy cars (he pre­ferred a pink Cadil­lac) and an exten­sive entourage.

But all of this came at a price. Barnes lamented that the sports writ­ers of the time, who had enor­mous power to build up and then tear down a fighter, soon turned on Robin­son and crit­i­cised him for his unsports­man­like greed. Of course many of these same writ­ers hap­pily buzzed around Frankie Carbo and other New York mob­sters who con­trolled the sport at the time.

Robinson’s finan­cial con­fi­dence extended beyond the ring. At a time when banks would not lend black peo­ple money for busi­nesses, he realised the only way he could become finan­cially inde­pen­dent was to invest his own money. […] After Robin­son pur­chased six build­ings in Harlem, “he did not need to go to the bankers ever again”. He owned sev­eral busi­nesses, includ­ing his famed (and now defunct) night­club, “Sugar Ray’s”.

This reminds me of the self-reliance quote from The 50th Law (pre­vi­ously).

Ignor­ing, for a moment, the rather unsound and out­moded neu­ro­science pro­pounded in the intro­duc­tion, these tips for extend­ing influ­ence online and per­suad­ing your vis­i­tors are worth a few minutes:

1. Show rat­ings and reviews by other users (for action through social val­i­da­tion).
2. Pro­vide instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and a quick fix.
3. Put the most impor­tant action to be done first.
4. Use the illu­sion of scarcity (pre­vi­ously).
5. Build reci­procity by giv­ing away some­thing for free.
6. Learn to use food, sex and dan­ger in an adver­tis­ing context.
7. Limit the choices avail­able and pro­mote bun­dles (noted in this list with the para­dox of choice/too-much-choice effect the­ory firmly in mind: while the advice is solid, the para­dox of choice the­ory is over­es­ti­mated).
8. Speak to your vis­i­tor by using the word ‘You’ (per­son­al­i­sa­tion).
9. Get your vis­i­tors to make a (small) com­mit­ment. Prefer­ably a pub­lic one.
10. Use images that demon­strate sim­i­lar­ity and attractiveness.
11. Be a mas­ter at telling stories.

Will­ing­ness to pay to pre­vent trau­matic life events is “the rel­e­vant stan­dard” for mea­sur­ing the hurt they inflict upon a per­son.

This is accord­ing to Robin Han­son, respond­ing to com­ments in an ear­lier arti­cle of his (pre­vi­ously) where he sug­gested that as cuck­oldry “is a big­ger repro­duc­tive harm than rape, so we should expect a sim­i­lar inten­sity of inher­ited emo­tions about it. If 2+% of women were raped and we had a reli­able cheap way to iden­tify the guilty party, don’t you think we’d require that?”

Many were offended by Hanson’s com­par­i­son of the hurt a man has inflicted on him through cuck­oldry to the hurt inflicted on a rape vic­tim, so he notes that, accord­ing to the afore­men­tioned rel­e­vant stan­dard, men seem to hurt more in some sit­u­a­tions (divorce, death of a spouse/child, etc.) than women (orig­i­nal arti­cle by Paul Fri­jters), so why not in this situation?

What’s a mar­riage worth? To an Aussie male, about $32,000. That’s the lump sum Pro­fes­sor Paul Fri­jters says the man would need to receive out of the blue to make him as happy as his mar­riage will over his life­time. An Aussie woman would need much less, about $16,000.  But when it comes to divorce, the Aussie male will be so dev­as­tated it would be as if he had lost $110,000. An Aussie woman would be less trau­ma­tised, feel­ing as if she had lost only $9000. […]  The life­time boost to hap­pi­ness that flows from a birth – for the mother around $8700, for the father $32,600. […]  The death of a spouse or child causes a woman $130,900 worth of grief. […] It costs a man $627,300.

Note(s): It is not clear whether the gen­der pay gap is taken into con­sid­er­a­tion in the above cal­cu­la­tions.
It’s also worth not­ing that if one were to put a finan­cial value on cuck­oldry and rape, cuckoldry’s more obvi­ous finan­cial impli­ca­tions (rais­ing another man’s child) must be taken into account (i.e. sub­tract­ing it, at least in part, from the fig­ure).
In this con­text cuck­oldry refers to non-paternity events, rather than just unfaith­ful­ness. With this in mind, I agree with Robin Han­son: “I’d pre­fer to be raped rather than cuckolded”.

A non-paternity event is a sit­u­a­tion whereby the bio­log­i­cal father of a child is “some­one other than who it is pre­sumed to be”. Typ­i­cally this involves some form of pater­nity fraud.

In one of the most gut-wrenching arti­cles I’ve read in months (due to the many human inter­est sto­ries in the arti­cle, no doubt), the sur­pris­ing inci­dence of non-paternity events, and reme­dies for how to com­bat the sit­u­a­tion, are dis­cussed:

The most exten­sive and author­i­ta­tive report […] con­cluded that 2 per­cent of men with “high pater­nity con­fi­dence” — mar­ried men who had every rea­son to believe they were their children’s father — were, in fact, not bio­log­i­cal par­ents. Sev­eral stud­ies indi­cate that the rate appears to be far higher among unmar­ried fathers. […]

At a fed­er­ally con­vened sym­po­sium on the increase in pater­nity ques­tions, a room­ful of child-welfare researchers, legal experts, aca­d­e­mics and gov­ern­ment admin­is­tra­tors agreed that much pain could be avoided if pater­nity was accu­rately estab­lished in a baby’s first days. Sev­eral sug­gested that DNA pater­nity tests should be rou­tine at birth, or at least before every pater­nity acknowl­edg­ment is signed and every default order entered.

The same care that hos­pi­tals take ensur­ing that the right mother is con­nected to the right new­born — foot­prints, match­ing ID bands, guarded nurs­eries, sur­veil­lance cam­eras — should be taken to ver­ify that the right man is deemed father.

via Over­com­ing Bias (Robin Han­son, sug­gest­ing that manda­tory pater­nity test­ing at birth should be intro­duced, not­ing how many birth defects with an inci­dence of far less than 2% are rou­tinely tested for.)

One of the cur­rent exhi­bi­tions being held in the Musée du Lou­vre, Paris has been curated by author and con­sis­tent top intel­lec­tual, Umberto Eco. The Infin­ity of Lists, as the exhi­bi­tion is called, looks at the human fas­ci­na­tion with lists and how they have pro­gressed cul­tures.

What does cul­ture want? To make infin­ity com­pre­hen­si­ble. It also wants to cre­ate order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infin­ity? How does one attempt to grasp the incom­pre­hen­si­ble? Through lists, through cat­a­logs, through col­lec­tions in muse­ums and through ency­clo­pe­dias and dictionaries.

But why do we feel this need to com­pre­hend and face infinity?

We have a limit, a very dis­cour­ag­ing, humil­i­at­ing limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no lim­its and, there­fore, no end. It’s a way of escap­ing thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Sug­gest­ing that Google is “a tragedy” for the young as they lack (or, more cor­rectly, they are not taught) basic infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy, Eco notes his obvi­ous dis­like of rote learning.

Cul­ture isn’t know­ing when Napoleon died. Cul­ture means know­ing how I can find out in two min­utes. Of course, nowa­days I can find this kind of infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net in no time.

This inter­view with Der Spiegel ends with a quote I must try to remember:

If you inter­act with things in your life, every­thing is con­stantly chang­ing. And if noth­ing changes, you’re an idiot.