gerberer

Summer Questions

There are a few questions on my mind today.

I'll turn these in to blog posts (someday) so if your an expert or if you've got an expert sounding opinion on these, let me know.

The summer before b-school maybe a last hurrah for a good old summer job for many of us. What's a great, alternative job to fill up your summer before starting grad school? Home renovations? Restaurant service? Summer camps? Serving the needy?

A student's budget - Time and money! Cutting cable reduces destractions, sure. But what if I want to have some limited fun on my TV from time to time? Netflix, HTPCs, Hulu, playstations...

GWSB's new dean wants to take us from the Top 50 to the Top 25, US News wise. What does that growth look/feel like. Which other schools have done that? Is that even possible?

Share your knowledge.

What we really, really know for sure

Both Taleb and Barry are intellectual heroes of mine and I love the slight parallels in quotes popping up in the unlikeliest of places.

"[Taleb] subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgment of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events don’t underline this worldview, nothing will.

If you start thinking about our faulty perceptions, the first thing you realize is that markets are not perfectly efficient, people are not always good guardians of their own self-interest and there might be limited circumstances when government could usefully slant the decision-making architecture (see “Nudge” by Thaler and Cass Sunstein for proposals). But the second thing you realize is that government officials are probably going to be even worse perceivers of reality than private business types. Their information feedback mechanism is more limited, and, being deeply politicized, they’re even more likely to filter inconvenient facts."

via David Brooks

"The most surprising thing about Franken's oeuvre is that, as good a satirist as he is, he's clearly smarter than he is funny. Dave Barry once famously defined a sense of humor as a "measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason."

via Jonathan Chait