A not too uncommon conversation that I have with my patients, goes something like this. Me: So has anything else been bothering you? Male patient: No Male patient’s wife: Why don’t you tell the doctor about how whenever you lie down flat you can’t breathe? Male patient: (Looks to me and rolls his eyes) Me: […]
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Bad Companies
I was lucky enough to do my internal medicine internship and residency at the University of Chicago on the southside of Chicago. This was a fantastic training program for a number of reasons. It was a high-powered academic center with ample research power. The residency program directors were humane and resident focused. Education was stressed […]
Premature Departure
I received some very sad and unwelcome news yesterday. One of my high school classmates died unexpectedly. She and I were not close friends in high school and it’s a tricky business remembering someone after they are gone ,which all makes my memory seem somewhat suspect. But still, feel I remember her well. And what […]
Visible Iceberg Parts
Market timing is for the birds. Except of course, when it isn’t. Tonight I thought I would write about one of my favorite investments. Interestingly, it is an investment that I do not hold much of a position in right now. Which kind of makes me a market timer. But I’m getting ahead of myself. […]
Sunshine and Lollipops
Do you have any friends who are a little bit too into their kids? You know the type, they constantly tell you amusing little stories about their kids brilliance and talent. They’re a bit too quick to whip out the iPhone in order to start showing you pictures of little Carleton with blueberries on his […]
White Coat Face Off: Mortgaging Your Future?
I’m in the midst of a bit of a call weekend beat down. Nothing terrible, just busy. Pacers, and consults, and pages, and so on. But the show must go on. Early retirement waits for no one. And it seems to me that today is as good a day to continue my pseudo-dialogue with the […]
Paradise Lost?
The miles game is not meant to be easy. It’s not a drive-through at a fast food joint where you handover a few crinkled bucks, and get back a neatly packaged, hermetically sealed, burger in a box. It’s more like foraging for morels in a burnt out urban forest. Some days it’s easy and you […]
Born to (not) Lose
The field of behavioral economics is an interesting one. One of its central tenets is that there is a so called “behavior gap.” This behavior gap describes how much less individual investors earn, on average when compared to the sum of their investments. And the reason for this behavior gap is that in many ways […]
Flowing Information
This post is really a reflection of the evolving nature of the Miles Game. This flowchart to has become woefully obsolete. (What with the death of Vanilla Reloads and the inability to load Vanilla Visa products onto your Serve/Bluebird accounts at Walmart.) So below you will find a more current flowchart. (Though I sadly recognize […]
Out On a Limb
There is something surprisingly useful about broadcasting your own assumptions to other people There is this concept called “what you see is all there is,” (WYSIATI) discussed extensively in Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast And Slow. And the point of WYSIATI is that our minds (particularly our intuitive “system”) are extremely biased towards narrative. So if […]
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