Purpose of this blog
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. We all know the old expression, ‘I’ll work my thoughts out on paper.’ There’s something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does.
I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.
Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
The purpose of this blog is to help me think clearly and learn. We only have a finite amount of capital - whether financial, intellectual, relational, time - and we need to think well about how to effectively allocate it.
The audience for this blog is first myself, both my current and future self. If others find it helpful, then that’s an added bonus!
Topics discussed on this blog
My background is in insurance, finance, and data science. This blog will touch on items related to each of these topics in addition to general business themes and whatever else I think is important to allocate capital towards.
Explanation of the blog name
The problem of points, also called the problem of division of the stakes, is a classical problem in probability theory. One of the famous problems that motivated the beginnings of modern probability theory in the 17th century, it led Blaise Pascal to the first explicit reasoning about what today is known as an expectation value.
The problem concerns a game of chance with two players who have equal chances of winning each round. The players contribute equally to a prize pot, and agree in advance that the first player to have won a certain number of rounds will collect the entire prize. Now suppose that the game is interrupted by external circumstances before either player has achieved victory. How does one then divide the pot fairly? It is tacitly understood that the division should depend somehow on the number of rounds won by each player, such that a player who is close to winning will get a larger part of the pot. But the problem is not merely one of calculation; it also includes deciding what a “fair” division should mean in the first place.
This blog is named after the classic probability game of the same name that was the impetus for the beginning of modern probability theory. Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat exchanged a series of letters in 1654 discussing the solution to this problem that ultimately gave birth to probability theory as we know it today. Both Pascal and Fermat were geniuses in several fields of science.
We live in an uncertain world. How should we divide up our various forms of capital?
Contact
Feel free to email me.