I’m still working on a follow-up to last week’s post on “Causal Loop Management”, but I wanted to send a quick post that week that covers two topics:
Showing Your Work: Aswath Damodaran’s valuation of Tesla
Virtue (or lack thereof): Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty
Let’s jump in.
Showing Your Work
We live in a world of hot takes where authority figures present themselves as talking heads. How often do we get to see people show their work?
Aswath Damodaran recently shared on Twitter his most recent valuation of Tesla. It’s such a treat. I love it because he walks you through his work, provides the spreadsheets, and encourages you to experiment. It’s like he’s saying, “Hey, I know I’m a finance professor at NYU, but don’t trust me because of my position; trust me because of my work, and if you disagree, that’s fine, but make sure you do your own work as well.” In his own words:
As you review my story and numbers, you will undoubtedly have very different views about Tesla going forward, and rather than tell me that you disagree with my views, which serves neither of us, please download the spreadsheet and make your own projections, by business.
How can we ensure that we continue to model “showing your work”, even as we grow in leadership, authority, and influence?
Virtue
Oh, Sam. If you haven’t heard, Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud yesterday in a federal court in New York. I’ve written about SBF twice already. The first time was when I wrote about Virtue a year ago, and a few weeks ago I provided an update with Ethics on Trial.
One of the themes I keep coming back to is the role of pick-and-choose ethics and the lack of virtue. We learn as children not to lie. It’s as adults that we learn to rationalize that lesson away.
The other night I was reading The Magican’s Nephew to my boys, the first book (chronologically) in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. At the beginning of the story, the boy Digory had just watched his friend Polly disappear into another world because she was tricked by Digory’s uncle into touching a magic ring.
He paused for a moment as if he expected Digory to say something. But Digory was disliking his Uncle more every minute, so he said nothing.
“Meanwhile,” continued Uncle Andrew, “I was learning a good deal in other ways (it wouldn’t be proper to explain them to a child) about Magic in general. That meant that I came to have a fair idea what sort of things might be in the box. By various tests I narrowed down the possibilities. I had to get to know some—well, some devilish queer people, and go through some very disagreeable experiences. That was what turned my head gray. One doesn’t become a magician for nothing. My health broke down in the end. But I got better. And at last I actually knew.”
Although there was not really the least chance of anyone overhearing them, he leaned forward and almost whispered as he said:
“The Atlantean box contained something that had been brought from another world when our world was only just beginning.”
“What?” asked Digory, who was now interested in spite of himself.
“Only dust,” said Uncle Andrew. “Fine, dry dust. Nothing much to look at. Not much to show for a lifetime of toil, you might say. Ah, but when I looked at that dust (I took jolly good care not to touch it) and thought that every grain had once been in another world—I don’t mean another planet, you know; they’re part of our world and you could get to them if you went far enough—but a really Other World—another Nature—another universe—somewhere you would never reach even if you traveled through the space of this universe forever and ever—a world that could be reached only by Magic—well!” Here Uncle Andrew rubbed his hands till his knuckles cracked like fireworks.
“I knew,” he went on, “that if only you could get it into the right form, that dust would draw you back to the place it had come from. But the difficulty was to get it into the right form. My earlier experiments were all failures. I tried them on guinea-pigs. Some of them only died. Some exploded like little bombs—”
“It was a jolly cruel thing to do,” said Digory, who had once had a guinea-pig of his own.
“How you do keep getting off the point!” said Uncle Andrew. “That’s what the creatures were for. I’d bought them myself. Let me see—where was I? Ah yes. At last I succeeded in making the rings: the yellow rings. But now a new difficulty arose. I was pretty sure, now, that a yellow ring would send any creature that touched it into the Other Place. But what would be the good of that if I couldn’t get them back to tell me what they had found there?”
“And what about them?” said Digory. “A nice mess they’d be in if they couldn’t get back!”
“You will keep on looking at everything from the wrong point of view,” said Uncle Andrew with a look of impatience. “Can’t you understand that the thing is a great experiment? The whole point of sending anyone into the Other Place is that I want to find out what it’s like.”
“Well why didn’t you go yourself then?”
Digory had hardly ever seen anyone look so surprised and offended as his Uncle did at this simple question. “Me? Me?” he exclaimed. “The boy must be mad! A man at my time of life, and in my state of health, to risk the shock and the dangers of being flung suddenly into a different universe? I never heard anything so preposterous in my life! Do you realize what you’re saying? Think what Another World means—you might meet anything—anything.”
“And I suppose you’ve sent Polly into it then,” said Digory. His cheeks were flaming with anger now. “And all I can say,” he added, “even if you are my Uncle—is that you’ve behaved like a coward, sending a girl to a place you’re afraid to go to yourself.”
“Silence, sir!” said Uncle Andrew, bringing his hand down on the table. “I will not be talked to like that by a little, dirty, schoolboy. You don’t understand. I am the great scholar, the magician, the adept, who is doing the experiment. Of course I need subjects to do it on. Bless my soul, you’ll be telling me next that I ought to have asked the guinea-pigs’ permission before I used them! No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice. But the idea of my going myself is ridiculous. It’s like asking a general to fight as a common soldier. Supposing I got killed, what would become of my life’s work?”
Is there anything new under the sun?