Random Thoughts.
Saturday August 15, 2026
When I was a teenager I was quite good at racquetball. If you have read the book Tevis’ book The Hustler, I was the fast Eddie of racquetball court. I got a reputation in my home town of being unbeatable.
Players ten years older than me would drive to my house in the sticks just to pick me up and bring me to various fitness clubs around Orlando so they could beat their bosses at doubles. My mom, who left for work before the school bus came and worked late every night, only found out this was happening because of the accident.
I was a latch key kid and like most of my generation disappearing for hours a time was just normal. Showing up a 6pm sweaty with a bag of Wendy’s was perfectly normal as well and warranted no inquisition or even the slightest raise of an eyebrow. My generation also drank from the hose.
In one of those matches, I took a racquet to the face from a left-handed middle age banker who thought he was playing tennis. I sort of ran face first into his swing to magnify the force of the blow.
There I was. Very cinematically, flat on back at a club I wasn’t a member and had been snuck in to.
Staring up and men I did not know (other than by what racquet they played with and whether the favored a forehand or backhand) not realizing that on my face was an impression of the crown of the racquet.
And that I had been knocked out cold. The previous moment had been spent trying to figure out if I was dead.
After some concerned discussion it was decided I should just be driven home with $1000 in my pocket to pay for the medical procedures that would necessarily follow. $1000 in 1993 was a lot of money to just have in cash.
So I was driven home. I vaguely remember the car was a 1993 Chrysler LeBaron convertible and my bike was in the backseat. Though I can’t say you should trust the memory of a 17 year old with a severe concussion. But, I can say cool air moving at 45 miles/hour stings open wounds and exposed nerves.
I never saw those bankers again.
I took less risks after that - on the court that is. I had many other lessons to learn in life.
But, I now valued my face more than I had before. I never really thought about my face before that moment in time. Do you think about your pinky toe very much? There are risks everywhere we just have no conscious awareness of until you stub your toe on a chair leg.
Now skills don’t fade just because you have surgery, I was still very good, but the edge needed to compete at a very high level was lost. Along with some blood, bone and teeth. When matches are won by 2 pts not covering aggressively is enough of a handicap to never win at that level.
In college I regularly played against and beat members university club team - a team that would win the National Championship - but I had stopped considering myself a racquetball player by that point. That identity was gone.
I continued to play for about a decade. When I first graduated and went to work in Atlanta I played against the Georgia State Champion. A very cocky man who over swung and who I beat in straight sets with an audience at the back glass wall.
The thing about sports is very diverse people tend to participate. And if you have a reputation of being “quite good” and helpful, as I was, and like to think I still am today, people will seek you out.
Between the age of 14 and 28, I played against doctors, lawyers, drug dealers, pharmaceutical sales, actors, politicians, a rare coin dealer (who told the most amazing stories of wealth,) a priest, a martial arts instructor who knew Bruce Lee, professors and a member of two royal families. Some were strict recreational players who wanted to work defense or just wanted to see how good they really were. Some were hustlers who dove around the court like they were shot out of canons and considered every point life-or-death.
Like I had a few years earlier.
And a few were (or would eventually be) very, very good. I continued to play racquetball in graduate school. And it was in graduate school that I met the greatest teacher of my life. A man truly singular in ethos.
He was an adjunct professor of philosophy at the university and to pay the bills also taught at the local community college named Craig. It didn’t take very long for me to realize he was different than every smart person I have ever met.
Craig had a very rare ability of leading people to a conclusion in a way that they themselves believed the idea was their own. Even if the idea had recently been unpalatable just a few minutes earlier.
If you have ever watched Family Guy, one Halloween episode James Woods is a led around by leaving out pieces of candy. Craig had the ability do this with his students.
And everyone else. He could lead you wherever he wanted you to go without you even realizing it.
Somehow, he could change your mind and your way of thinking without doing anything other than setting a path for you to take on your own. And I was incredibly jealous of this ability.
And I still am. It was mesmerizing to watch. Students would stop Craig in between games to ask him questions and challenge ideas he had presented in class and after a few minutes the student would inevitably be spun around intellectually without the regret, embarrassment or anger that normally follows admission of being wrong.
I literally watched Craig create good citizens of the world while drying off my armpits on a hand dryer mounted on the wall by the courts.
Our modern world is very one sided. We watch YouTube. Read blogs. Watch TV. Ideas are presented to us. We are lectured. At best we debated and argue with each other.
We have lost the ability to facilitate self-reflective thought in others in a manner that isn’t divisive. There are no Daryl Davises anymore. Not that people like that were ever common.
What if I am wrong? Rarely enters our minds and getting someone to step outside of their frame of reference voluntarily to arrive at an alternative conclusion is a lost skill.
No matter how good I was at racquetball I never once thought I was good a tennis.
I was thinking about Craig today after reading a paper on “epistemic trespass.”
There is a quote in this paper from Neil DeGrass Tyson who said that philosophy is ‘useless’ and majoring in philosophy ‘can really mess you up.’ The author of the paper considers Tyson’s comment a sign he trespassing intellectually.
What I realized is what is lost today isn’t that we conflate what our abilities across disciplines it’s that we no longer have any idea what expertise is in the first place. In the 19th and early 20th century, people would get together and TALK to each other. Geologists, writers, painters, poets, would gather together and discuss things. And, from these discussions, people learned just how relatively incompetent they were.
We don’t have this humility induction anymore. We all live online. We have no idea if our understanding is incorrect because there is no discussion amongst friends and peers to shine light on our misunderstandings.
Our brains are just full of cockroach thoughts now.
We follow people who are confident and charming. And we ever increasingly determine truth by net worth not by hours of being presented with the realization we aren’t experts even in the areas we are working in.
I was a teaching fellow in graduate school. For all intents and purposes I was and am an “expert” teacher. And, every time I watched Craig “teach” I felt just inept.
Ken Griffin said that Citadels’ “best” traders are accurate 54% of the time.
These are the supposed “experts.”
If you bat 540 in baseball you’d be a god. But, if your cut off the correct leg only 54% of the time you’d be a shit surgeon. Financial media has convinced us that 54% accuracy shows expertise. Does it?
A 54% win rate is only expert if you are competing against similarly skilled individuals. A surgeon is not competing against anyone so a 54% “win” rate is not good.
Wall Street is ostensibly competing against “dumb money.” (The misappropriated definition.) If you are a grown man and you bat 540 at kids t-ball can you really claim to be an expert at the sport of baseball?
Is that 4% advantage worth paying a fee to get that “expert” traders insights? Does a 4% gain in accuracy over a coin flipping robot make that much difference to a retail trader who makes 10 trades a year? The market goes up more than 54% of the time so just being biased long will get you the same advantage.
I am going to have to ask Craig to explain all this to me.
Alright, I have wasted enough time. Back to the quarterly review…
— AJ