Rust and Blight
In an orchard, it isn't always easy to tell the difference between rust and blight. The same goes for our cultural institutions.
Some should be prun…
Category: Notes From the Field
A Song of Ice and Fire
We are the human animal.
We are non-linear.
We ARE a song of ice and fire.
It’s a song that has built cathedrals and fed billions and taken us to…
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Part 13 of the Notes from the Field series discusses the Narrative Machine, which can help us see the invisible memes that drive our political behavio…
The Icarus Moment
We live in a Cartoon Age, an era not of alienation per Karl Marx, but of alienation per Groucho Marx. What’s the cause, what’s the future, and wha…
Good Job!
This is Part 11 of Ben's Notes from the Field series. I don’t need to calculate a Sortino ratio to know if my dogs are doing a Good Job. Same with a…
Too Clever By Half
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half…
The Three-Body Problem
What if I told you that the dominant strategies for human investing are, without exception, algorithms and derivatives? I don't mean computer-driven i…
Pecking Order
The pecking order is a social system designed to preserve economic inequality: inequality of food for chickens, inequality of wealth for humans. We ar…
Clever Hans
Part 7 of Ben's Notes from the Field series reminds us that you don’t break a wild horse by crushing its spirit. You nudge it into willingly surrend…
Sheep Logic
In Part 6 of the Notes from the Field Series, Ben observes that we think we are wolves, living by the logic of the pack. In truth we are sheep, living…
Always Go To the Funeral
There’s a pose that very sick farm animals sometimes take when they’re near death, where they lie down and twist their head way back into their sh…
The Arborist
In Part 4 of the Notes from the Field Series, Ben identifies how the natural lines of a tree and shaping the tree to follow those lines over time is a…
Horsepower
There is no animal more important to the ascendancy of Western Civilization than the horse, and no invention more important than the horse collar. Aft…
The Goldfinch in Winter
Part 2 of Ben's Notes from the Field series, in which he considers the question: what can a bird teach us about value investing? To everything there i…
Notes From the Field
What does farming have to do with investing? Quite a lot, actually. In this first of a series that takes on a life of its own, Ben discusses bees and …