As many of you know, I left Katong Capital as of May this year, where I worked with Yishen Kuik and Jeff Ma for the last 3 years. The statistics was fun, the infrastructure building was fun, and I have had the fortune to continue to do those things at my current job with Minus Inc.

I still greatly enjoy finance ideas, the same way I will continue to enjoy electronic structure. I also have a lot more to say about working in small partnerships now, hah. Ideology, can't live without it, can't live with it - it can be difficult to diagnose insanity from the inside!

Idealism is necessary for someone to behave with honor. I am wary of people who are very up front about their own cynicism - I think it's expectation-setting behavior. It may be presented as a form of humility, as in "I'm very self-aware about the limitations of my own understanding", but what I've seen it come out to mean is "Don't expect me to hold to any of my commitments, as I will plead ignorance for any acts of self-interested malice I willingly commit."

Necessary doesn't mean sufficient, of course. There are plenty of idealistic assholes out there - it's just that the self-labeling cynic is declaring their intent to be an asshole upfront, and one does well to take the free warnings as they come.

Inspired by the bit about expectations, employment and marriage in the most recent EconTalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/08/reid_hoffman_an.html

I take great joy in incoherent rambling. I find the sound of my own voice, even when just in my own head, to be pleasant. I think this is because there is a form of thinking that can only happen when you are writing for yourself, and if you have any kind of intellectual personality then what you write for yourself would be unintelligible to others just because you have a unique background of assumptions and private knowledge which other people don't have.

Only writing for the consumption of others can be very stifling on actual thought. There is writing that, while it makes for good public consumption, if you wrote that way when writing for yourself then you are a sadly shallow individual. Never forget that marketing and self-promotion goes into public writing - don't drink your own kool-aid.