Yesterday evening I read The Cheat Code To Life in the Aug-13 issue of the WIRED Magazine.Bill Hader's first pro tip: "Tell people it's your birthday. You'll get free drinks and meals ...."
I really enjoyed reading the article about the sneaky tricks and rule-bending ... knowing that they are fruit of sarcasm. At the other hand it is about "look stronger than you are" and "the key to getting away with any kind of cheating do not act like a winner".
In Stop Lying With Models I referred to an abuse of risk models to suite the needs to higher ups. Knowingly.
On the model side, we have seen the tendency towards complicated stochastic models with a large number of (more or less) independent driving factors in the past. The art of robust calibration lies in choosing models that are able to handle also difficult market situations (like negative interest rates) and appropriately stabilized identification schemes. As soon as correlation comes into play, risk professionals should be aware of massive model uncertainty and include model scenarios to the scenarios on market data variations ...
However, falling into a trap is not cheating.
To avoid them, UnRisk has organized instruments, models and methods orthogonally.
But let me come back to the article: Persuade Friends to Do Stuff For You is one of the recommendations. It relates to some bad sales practices. Most important solution sales instead of insight sales (push clients and partners out of their comfort zone), along with provocation-based selling ...
And it came to my mind that some of the provocatively collected examples may be closer too reality than thought?
No, our life is not simpler, if it isn't for other people. There is co-evolution and co-creation.
Picture from sehfelder
