THE ANSWER (to unsolvable problems) Part I

“From this rough metal we forge virtue.”

– Quarry Bank High School motto

In the 1950s, QBHS had a problem student.

QBHS boasted an “A Cluster” offering the most challenging courses reserved for the best and brightest – kids with the most potential, expected to further their education at top institutions of higher learning. Kids expected to do great things like win a Nobel Prize someday 😉

Into this “A Cluster”, boy who would drive everyone batshit a certain boy was enrolled. QBHS had recognised his abilities, and accorded the corresponding respect and opportunity to nurture this.

After his first year, he was however downgraded to the “B Cluster”.

2 years later, he had unceremoniously been demoted into the “C Cluster”. This was where they dumped put dumped the kids everyone had given up on. Kids not expected to amount to anything in life.

As one teacher put it on his school report, “a poor result due to the fact he spends all his time devising witty remarks.” Another used the word “hopeless.” This boy failed nine out of nine tests.

It wasn’t just teachers who thought he was a problem, parents did too. One of the friends he would come to work closely with when interviewed recalled his father saying, “You stay away from him.”

What appeared a problem (back then) that turned out to not be a real problem (debatable) was that this boy was actually learning in his own way by making a total horse’s behind of himself pitting himself against educators. “C Cluster” or no, he wrote like a demon. At age 10, he devoured countless volumes of short stories, and created his own journals for poems, musings and sketches. His aunt whom he lived with periodically blew through his room, carrying with her sheaves and sheaves of papers which she promptly disposed of, just to keep the furious production from overwhelming the place.

“When I was 12,” Problem Student recalled, “I thought I must be a genius, only nobody’s noticed.” 

10 years after he left Quarry Bank, he received a letter from current students trying to make sense of his writings in English class. Flattered (kind of), he produced a work in their honour:

“I Am A Walrus.”

The sole purpose of Walrus was apparently to befuddle anyone who tried to make sense of it.

The boy’s name was John Lennon. Boy Whose Dad Didn’t Want Them Hanging Out is Sir Paul McCartney. I call it The Problem That This Book About Answers To Problems Says Isn’t A Real Problem And Yet I Think It Kinda Still Is, because they were drugged to the eyeballs so often and that can’t be good even if they’re making money.

This is not about how in every problem kid lies a rough diamond, a star waiting to be discovered, a “genius” that teachers (and parents) just didn’t “get”. This is to say that EVEN IF YOU ARE FREAKING JOHN LENNON YOU ARE STILL GETTING DETENTION 😀 

BUT

If you are John Lennon, your original detention sheets sell for up to GBP 3,000 😀 

He worked hard for the money, baby. Driving everyone up the wall in the name of his own education and potentially at the expense of other students’ takes work. 🙂 No I don’t mean that in a mean way – he wasn’t sorry about it, he made an entire incredibly successful career from being nuts and high.

I feel like after making that observation, I need to find a more erm, redeeming eg along the same lines:

This is the Chuck Norris Phenomenon of Yore (it’s yore in internet terms 🙂  ) and story goes, one day the internet decided to elevate Guy Who Was Once Beaten By Bruce Lee On Film’s career by inserting “Chuck Norris” in all manner of pop culture fantastical feats. Quite suddenly, in that random way social media has, Chuck Norris of the Bruce Lee action era was internet royalty to a whole new generation.

Everything’s a “package”…. of goods and bads, and every decision you ever make will be a choice to take both. (Where you land in your choices should be how important each good and bad is on your personal laundry list of priorities.) So too the internet – it’s not going anywhere, we’re stuck with it, may as well look for legitimate opportunity when we hear “legitimate risk.” Not all netizens are evil (just a good number of them are 😀 ), look how much fun everyone had with CN (and I’m forever taken by Sir Anthony Hopkins’ admission to not understanding technology but having no problem using it for the most entertaining, make-no-sense-but-look!-technology! movies)..

 

Alright, back to the book – I got to page 146 before I thought, This Is Awesome. How Come? Who wrote it? See, I have a confession to make. I really didn’t feel it when I read Small Data and tried to write it, but it was a New York Times Bestseller, while I’ve never even written a book in my life, so who’m I to talk right? <cough Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome> But I’ve been looking for a problem solving book to go with the Small Data-esque observations ever since, and found:

David Niven, PhD, writes from research findings that are……. counterintuitive in the spades. But as an advocate for No Free Lunch who spent her former life looking for As Close As You Could Get (To Free Lunches) In Investment Products, I firmly believe in the “market” already pricing in all apparent “wins” to the point that your only way to find a true “win” is to be counterintuitive, where the market hasn’t priced everything in. Because if you and everyone else all agree it’s a good buy, you’re paying for it upfront no matter how cheap you THINK it is – the only way to make a profit from that is if things get even better than everyone expected. 

“eBay culture” is pretty interesting. Years ago I used to love to look at all the crazy things people bought and sold, simply if someone wanted it and was willing to pay something for it. You can technically make a trade out of virtually anything (legal) that someone wants to buy, and someone else has available to sell. You might think financial derivatives have no bearing on anything else in the “real” world, but you can find a way to artificially access practically anything, if you had an investor (and a lawyer 😀 )- decades ago, David Bowie securitised the rights to some of his songs. (So it’s not just credit derivatives, bonds, property, mortgages and all the other “boring” stuff)..

I initially showed eBay to Rockstar. Ready buyer, ready seller. It happened in garage sale junk on eBay (old Barbies, Transformer toys, your unopened trading Pokemon baseball cards), and it happened in Over-The-Counter products like credit derivatives and swaps. And then people broke this wonderful mechanism by all the cheating – they cheated on eBay, they cheated on countless derivatives, there arose so many caveat emptors, so many Buyer Bewares, so much time and energy spent catching crooks and throwing the book at them, instead of well, actually creating something. If people didn’t have to spend so much time watching their backs (or looking for backs to stab) think how much more energy would be poured into…. curing cancer. Solving poverty and famine. The list goes on…..

Welcome to the World of What Happens When Aileen Does Her Crackpot Theory of Demand & Supply: As long as it pays (extra “perks” might alter this a bit) more to be a crook, you will always attract first rate crooks. Insanely brilliant people who say, deliberately start fires for kicks. (Unfortunately many insanely brilliant people come with egos to match.) The first time I said that was in relation to Enron (“as long as it pays more to be a crook than a regulator, you will get first-rate crooks and second-rate regulators; the only way around this is to throw the book so hard at misdemeanours that it “costs” too much to be a crook.” I was a trainee auditor for awhile, right after graduating).

Wherein lies the rub of course, is how to determine what the real “misdemeanour” is and who should really get the book thrown at them. (Think about it: that’s literally everything. That’s also near-impossible to do without a huge amount of resources and effort and possible failure. Case in point: “Collateralised Debt Obligation, CDO,” has become almost a dirty word. The problem of course, is almost never the actual instrument. It’s what people used it for. The difference between giving a monkey or a sushi chef a knife.)

Oh, and btw, sushi chefs use really sharp knives and connoisseurs like to eat things like fugu (pufferfish. What are the odds you die from eating a piece of sushi where the poison sac has been punctured by a less-skilled chef?) And you thought CDOs were a walk on the wild side? 😀 But back to my original point – CDOs can be amazing for corporates with a particular purpose and Board requirements in mind… and then someone said Oh, That Worked So Well Let’s Make That Retail, Sell It To Your Average Uncle-On-The-Street. WAIT, there’s more – there were guys who chose to buy 16 different tranches of CDO over an extended time frame, and tried to put in mis-sell claims for all of it. Their defence was “I never knew what I was doing” (all 16 times and half a decade).
This is a HUGE pet peeve for me because people who do this rob assistance from the people who really need and deserve it. (Ends Rant).

As for John Lennon, they weren’t wrong about him in school but by the time that epiphany came round, I wonder where his old teachers are today (“I hated that kid, and he became a Beatle?!). But eBay, Derivatives, People, Hindsight. I wonder how Lennon’s aunt felt about throwing out all those papers in hindsight…