I was recently invited to give a talk on heuristics and biases at Jane Street Capital, one of the top proprietary trading firms ("proprietary" = they trade their own money).  When I got back home, I realized that (a) I'd successfully managed to work through the trip, and (b) it'd been very pleasant mentally, a nice change of pace.  (One of these days I have to blog about what I discovered at Jane Street - it turns out they've got their own rationalist subculture going.)

So I've decided to hang out my shingle as a speaker at financial companies.

You may be thinking:  "Perhaps, Eliezer, this is not the best of times."

Well... I do have hopes that, among the firms interested in having me as a speaker, a higher-than-usual percentage will have come out of the crash okay.  I checked recently to see if this were the case for Jane Street Capital, and it was.

But more importantly - your competitors are learning the secrets of rationality!  Are you? 

Or maybe I should frame it as:  "Not doing too well this year?  Drop the expensive big-name speakers.  I can give a fascinating and useful talk and I won't charge you as much."

And just to offer a bit of a carrot - if I can monetize by speaking, I'm much less likely to try charging for access to my future writings.  No promises, but something to keep in mind.  So do recommend me to your friends as well.

Followup to:  Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?, Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

"The financial crisis is not the crisis of capitalism.  It is the crisis of a system that has distanced itself from the most fundamental values of capitalism, which betrayed the spirit of capitalism."
        -- Nicolas Sarkozy

During the current crisis, I've more than once heard someone remarking that financial-firm CEOs who take huge bonuses during the good years and then run away when their black-swan bets blow up, are only exercising the usual capitalist values of "grab all the money you can get".

I think that a fair amount of the enmity in the world, to say nothing of confusion on the Internet, stems from people refusing to contemplate the real values of the opposition as the opposition sees it.  This is something I've remarked upon before, with respect to "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "the suicide hijackers were cowards" (statements that are sheerly silly).

Real value systems - as opposed to pretend demoniacal value systems - are phrased to generate warm fuzzies in their users, not to be easily mocked.  They will sound noble at least to the people who believe them.

Whether anyone actually lives up to that value system, or should, and whether the results are what they are claimed to be; if there are hidden gotchas in the warm fuzzy parts - sure, you can have that debate.  But first you should be clear about how your opposition sees itself - a view which has not been carefully optimized to make your side feel good about its opposition.  Otherwise you're not engaging the real issues.

So here are the traditional values of capitalism as seen by those who regard it as noble - the sort of Way spoken of by Paul Graham, or P. T. Barnum (who did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"), or Warren Buffett:

I applaud the SEC's courageous move to ban short selling.  Isn't that brilliant?  I wonder why they didn't think of that during the Great Depression.

However, I feel that this valiant effort does not go far enough.

All selling of stocks should be banned.  Once you buy a stock, you have to hold it forever.

Sure, this might make the market a little less liquid.  But once stock prices can only go up, we'll all be rich!

Or maybe we should just try something simpler: pass a law making it illegal for stock prices to go down.