michael burry, aspie super star.

Post Reply New Topic

what do you all think of Dr Michael Burry, one of the few men to make a fortune off the recession, imo i say way to go, just another example of the intellectual superiority of people with aspergers.

also i read in a news article that bill gates also might have A.S. im pretty sure it was the times.

No, just an example of the advantages of having better information. Not of superiority.

being better informed, he was the man that figured it out and gave people the information, so companys like golden sacks could make money.

watch these, also keep in mind he has no forumal training, just some guy smart enough to figure it out, and make a fortune.

http://dahhuilaudavid.blogspot.com/2010 ... art-1.html

It is very impressive, I'm not denying that. I'm failing to see how this is "another" sign of Aspie superiority.

in modern day society people like us have many advantages, there is a huge demand for people who are highly skilled in pacific areas, some thing aspies excelle at, given time i think people with aspergers will have a have a genetic advantage over non aspies, for this trait. i believe society will over time embrace us for our potential, some thing i think is already starting to happen, huge portion of people in mesa are autistic, family's with a lot of autism in there line are over twice as likely to become engineers.

at the same time a few hundred years ago, being autistic would more often than not be a bad thing, for being a person with many skills was far more useful than being a person that excelled in a few and did poorly in others, but in this modern day and age, that's changing,

Pity I am not highly skilled because I am in a Pacific area.


What sort of directly useful/functional/productive things do all people with Aspergers excell at?

heaven forbid i miss spell a word.

engineering physics, any thing related to math, art in all its forms, just about any subject a person could be obsessive over. key is finding one that can make money and be productive.

The subject of this thread is an interesting contrast to the thread about the allegation that some Aspergian accountants were to blame for the current financial crisis. Here is the link if you are curious.
http://www.wrongplanet.net/posts118550- ... 5dc923c017

sorry i don't take a article by a guy who doesn't no much about what hes talking about serios, a person with aspergers can be just as foolish as a person with out it. and sure i believe there is a lot higher population of aspies in accounting, we tend to like math, those we tend to be in jobs that deal with math, doesn't mean we brought the hole thing crashing down. they were just as blind as any other person at the time.

I don't like to see people as superior. Intelligent maybe, but I don't see autism as something more superior. I don't see NT's as superior. I don't see authority figures as superior. I don't see the Queen of England as super---well, you get it.

allow me to rephrase, having aspergers in the future will be a genetic advantage. the demand for people who can be highly skilled in very specific fields has bin and is still rising, which happens to coincide with the rise of or at the very least the apparent rise of autism,

*Yawn*

I see a few problems with this:
1) To have AS you need to be impaired enough in life to be diagnosed.
2) In three years AS won't even be diagnosable anymore.
3) You'd still need an NT spell checker.
4) There's no genetic advantage. Oh wow, you can think a bit differently. A more social NT could still be able to do your job. Everything I can do an NT can do better. You know what, I'm going to write a song about that.

1) well ive gotten over most of my social issues with practice and support,

2) whys that

3) hey i try my best =(

4) and i disagree with you sir, could a nt do better than good ol Albert. also apparently Bill Gates probably has it according to the new york times.

Hmmm. I'd tried to get some discussion on Burry going a while ago (posts on the Vanity Fair excerpt from Michael and the 60 Mintues segment with Burry and Lewis) and got little traction. I am not sure I get where this thread is going, but being a lot closer to finance than most people and an undiagnosed AS in Burry's vein and in his age group, I think I'd share some thoughts.

1. Burry did NOT have better information than most players in these markets. He might be said to have a more thorough thought process and a different perspective. There are hundreds, if not thousands of NTs closer to the action that would have had better information. Consider that Burry basically made his money by having better insights than all the traders and researchers at the big banks who 1) would have had more resources at their disposal, 2) been able to see the moves of the markets much more easily, and 3) been in social and professional networks that would be good at sharing information, even sharing ostsensibly illegal information via clever tricks that satisfied the letter of the law.

2. It is obviously silly to claim AS superiority. It is not silly to claim that AS people, by virtue of being different, improve humanity substantially. I am not saying Burry's success is a great boon to humanity, I am saying that keeping the Burrys of the world on the sidelines is deeply, deeply damaging to humanity. I heard Lewis speak this week and he was emphatic, and I think rightly so, that the being outside of the action was crucial to seeing the lies in the housing market and in the financial services industry. Most players in the industry had unspoken pact to keep the madness going. This is the bad side of NT behavior, and to the extent AS people don't fall for these 'trends', our awkwardness and lack of grace should be seen as a relatively small price to pay for our providing more diverse perspectives.

I don't want to belabor this point too much, but there is a whole body of thought on complex systems and diversity and stability that comes to mind. Basically, any complex system where a huge number of players are operating on the same assumptions is going to collapse sooner or later. A diversity of opinions, that is players operating on varied assumptions and with varied goals, is vastly more stable. This is the social value of neurodiversity: while we are frequently at odds with NT society, we provide it with a very, very valuable service, that of improving stability.

3. The bit about AS people 'causing' the financial crisis has to do with a very narrow set of issues. The people in question, risk managers (who are NOT accountants, btw), are charged with the finding the downside to the activities of the profit generators at a financial institution and acting to mitigating the damage. In the last few decades, this field has gone from being the province of greybeards to one for quantatitive superstars. Being quantatitively gifted screams AS to many people. But the real intellectual issue is the that mathematics tends to force a focus on a few narrow issues, hence the charge of AS people 'causing' the financial crisis. It does bear repeating that most conventional risk management formulas would have forced a focus on a few narrow issues. The most easily conveyed 'narrow issue' is the quantatitive idea that risk is equivalent to standard deviation and that all price movements are truly random, this hides the fact that prices move wildly. The problem with noting that the most naive quantative applications force a narrow view of risk is that these risk management types are the least likely to be listened to in bank. I.E. they may have been way wrong, but nobody was listening to them anyway.

Please feel free to follow up or raise additional points. I would enjoy discussing this with any of you.