my journal 3


maybe hitler was gay, that's what they argue starting at minute 35 and later

so maybe that's why he killed Ernst Röhm, who maybe was a former partner -- but I also have to add that these "historians" are not exactly academics (everyone wrote a book, OK, but they're not the most prestigious historians on the subject)... if academics know more than non-academics, which is not a given. For example, on 911 people on facebook and with crappy websites are telling us much more truths than academics.

probably he also killed his niece
 
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origins of English

This is very interesting. I found a database of old Germanic dialects and pronunciations, here:
http://www.regionalsprache.de/Audio/Katalog.aspx

I then also came across this Germanic tribe, of the Angeln, while doing a crossword puzzle:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angeln_(Volk)
Offenbar wurden die Germanen zunächst von den römischen Einwohnern der Insel als Hilfstruppen (foederati) angeworben, um das Land nach dem Abzug der kaiserlichen Truppen (410) gegen die Überfälle der barbarischen Pikten zu schützen.
Click to expand...
It says that in the 400s, more or less, a lot of these guys emigrated to England, mostly recruited by the Romans as soldiers.

Well, I checked on that audio database and they do sound a little bit English:
they_do_sound_english.jpg

Well, actually I am not an expert, but at least they don't have any alveolar trill.

Let's see if it's mentioned in the English wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
The Angles (Latin Anglii) were one of the main Germanic peoples who settled in Britain in the post-Roman period. They founded several of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, and their name is the root of the name England. The name comes from the district of Angeln, an area located on the Baltic shore of what is now Schleswig-Holstein, the most northern state of Germany.
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No mention of the Roman soldiers' theory.
 
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All training for trading should be divided into two parts:

1) learning to not get angry when you lose and not excited when you win

2) learning what trades are profitable

But you can't start number 2 unless you're first done with #1. The reason is that lacking #1 blinds you from really observing the markets. Your brain is polluted by emotions. In every field of life it is like this, but in trading you lose money, so you notice it more.
 
Ok, always regarding my trading training and mental revolution, here's another way to put it:

You have to do your best, but you must not get mad and lose control if something doesn't work out.

That is to say: in life and in trading, if something goes wrong, you must still keep doing your best and not waste time with anger, revenge or similar.

This must not be confused with saying "I will not meet this person who treats me badly". This is not revenge but optimization of future interaction with people. If instead you do it out of revenge, it might be a poor choice.

You know, this is a revolution, because for those who do their best, us perfectionists, it is not easy to let go and not be upset if something (usually for someone else's fault) doesn't work out. In the markets, this is lethal, and furthermore it doesn't make sense to accuse the market, and it leads to further trading mistakes.
 
how to measure anger/frustration/stress

I played another game:
http://chartgame.com/play.cgi?37fc4s-1

I don't know if it will stay memorized for long, but the link for a little bit seems to work.

No, this is the way it works. You click that link then you go to "track record" and find the exact game played, which in this case it's this:
http://chartgame.com/review.cgi?37fc4s-1,sp500/1038,970205

I wish I had a way to measure my anger/frustration/stress during these games. I wish I could measure my progress in controlling my emotions.

Some telltale signs of anger are these:
1) if you insult someone, you've lost it and you're not doing what I mean to do: self-control, rationality, serenity, and only acts that benefit me -- nothing out of anger or frustration
2) complaining
3) scratching (head, nose, biting fingers, lips, etc.)
4) of course also banging on the wall or on the desk with your fists - but I never do this
5) the feeling of anger, but this I can recognize only if it's strong
6) I think I slightly close my eyes if I am expressing aggressiveness when I am talking to someone
7) aggressive speech (sarcasm, criticism, etc.)
8) nervous laughter to myself (sarcastic)
9) crossing my legs
10) "short, deep, exhaling sigh" (definition taken from here)
11) Wide-eyed stare.
12) showing the middle finger to someone/something, even behind their back.

Some more body language signs are found here:
http://changingminds.org/techniques/body/parts_body_language/mouth_body_language.htm

Something more on measuring stress here:
http://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_anyone_suggest_a_validated_instrument_for_measuring_stress10

I need to watch out for these and write down whatever other signs I find. If they disappear, it means I am doing a good job.
 
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my father, the cause of all my problems (and qualities)

travis said:
https://www.khanacademy.org/about/b...mail (Students - Remaining)&utm_content=Final

My 5-year-*old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell*-tale signs of a “growth* mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

image

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually...

[...]
Click to expand...

I was thinking back to this post I wrote a few days ago -- it's a quote by Salman Khan, and it continues in the next post.

I definitely did not have a father who told me, as Salman Khan recommends, "I am glad that you tried hard", but instead I had a father who told me "although you succeeded, you could have done better". Actually he always omitted the "although you succeeded" part and just said "you could have done better" and usually he even just pointed out what I had done wrong. So, basically everything I did, no matter how well, resulted in hearing criticism from my father, that sick *******. Needless to say, this lead to a very frustrating life. That's why I have always felt this urge to outdo myself, which results in blowing out my accounts.
 
fake and staged bull**** by dishonest capa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Soldier
...Since Espejo had been at some distance from the battle lines when Capa was there, Susperregui said that this meant that the Falling Soldier photograph was staged, as were all the others in the same series, supposedly taken on the front...[8]
Click to expand...

250px-Capa,_Death_of_a_Loyalist_Soldier.jpg

At least nobody died from this crap. I don't like so-called "art" that exploits death. No one should enjoy anyone's death. No one's death should become a show. So I am glad this picture was a fake. All the people who were fooled, and thought what a wonderful picture it was, deserved it.
 
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great british documentaries from this youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ganjaaa930/videos




I think I know what they did. It's too good to be true that there were so many color movies from the 1930s and 1940s. They colored them artificially. You can tell, too, but nonetheless it is pleasant and they did an excellent job.
 
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DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SELF-CONTROL AND EMOTION/STRESS CONTROL

I used to keep an excel journal to monitor self-control, with a checklist and all the things I did not want to do: usual scratching my head and so on. What I realized is that self-control is a very limited and counterproductive approach, that only deals with repressing the consequences of emotions that should not rise in the first place.

For example. Let's say that I trade with the approach, as I did, that I am special, that I am lucky, that I was always meant to succeed, that everything, in trading as in life, must go according to my plans and expectations. Then, after 5 straight wins, something goes really wrong and the market keeps moving against me. I get mad and double up and keep doubling up until I blow out my account.

Initially, I'd call this a problem of "self-control", but it is not. You can't set yourself up for such disappointments and strong emotions, and then expect to control yourself. You can't invest all your hopes and expectations on the next trade going your way, expecting everything to be perfect.

So self-control is a very stupid concept. You first have to deal with stress control, with emotion control, and I don't mean dealing with the stress and emotions once they are there, but especially before they happen.

So, here you don't have to consider as a problem the fact that you clicked the wrong button out of anger at the market, but all the wrong assumptions you had about reality, namely that you're blessed by the gods, that things will eventually go your way and that you will ever be able to completely control the world around you. You can't. You can only produce the optimal reaction to undesired events.

In other words, those emotions and that stress should not be there to begin with and the concept of "self-control" leads to mistakenly consider the consequence of wrong assumptions as the entire problem. You should not have to deal with those emotions and stress, because they should not be there in the first place.

So, all these telltale signs of stress, such as scratching my head, should not be considered as things to be repressed, but as:

1) signs that I am in the wrong place/situation
2) signs that I have the wrong assumptions about the place/situation I am in

Solution, rather than just "stop scratching your head" or "stop doubling up on losing trades":

1) avoid place/situation that causes wrong behavior
2) even better: make the best of that place/situation (if there are such profitable opportunities) by adopting the right approach and making the right assumptions about the place/situation

For example, in these two cases:

1) trading: there are profitable opportunities, but you need to make the right assumptions, namely that the market and the gods aren't with you and that you're not going to control reality in the way you control numbers on an excel sheet
2) crowded room, usually waste of time, and no profitable opportunities, so you should not worry about adopting the "right" approach, but should just leave the place as soon as you can.

So I will now create a new excel sheet where I will not list things to repress via self-control (scratching, biting, doubling up on losing trades, etcetera), but I will list the same exact things, as telltale signs of the fact that I am either in the wrong place/situation or that I have made the wrong assumptions about it.

Last example. I am talking to an idiot and I expect to understand what I am saying. Then I get mad when he doesn't understand my reasoning. The problem is not the fact that I get mad. The problem is 1) the fact that I was talking to him, and 2) the fact that I was expecting him to understand me. So if you find yourself scratching yourself while talking to an idiot, or getting angry, you should not think "i have a problem with self-control" but instead you should think "I have a problem about assessing reality and drawing conclusions about how to interact with reality".

In my case in particular, since being a child, I have always had a problem with my expectation of how things should be, and how I forced that vision onto the real world. I never accepted the real world, and always thought: it has to be the way I thought it would be, and the way I was taught it should be.

In Italy we say "the best is the enemy of good". If you can't achieve what's best, you keep trying and often waste time and make things even worse. This is one typical problem that people like me have, because they try to force everyone to behave honestly, politely and intelligently as they do. Or basically, they just try to force everyone to act according to their desires, including the markets. As I said before, I can't keep expecting this. It is not going to work and it is not going to lead to optimal action.
 
it's working... it's taking shape.

As I get bothered, nervous, at work or at home, I write down what kind of telltale signs I express. Here's the outline I've been able to draft so far:

Snap1.jpg
 
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telltale signs of stress / frustration / anger / fear /

I am done with my job of writing down the signs I have to watch out for, because they mean I am losing control of my own behavior. So far I've come up with about 30 signs/symptoms. As I wrote in the file, cf. attached image below, I don't have to fight the signs, but the causes of these symptoms:

Snap1.jpg
 
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I am feeling some chest pain. In case I disappear suddenly, it's because I died, or I am in a coma. I will not otherwise abandon this journal.

Great song by the usual genius Peter Igelhoff:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Igelhoff

The only problem is that he has no voice. Comedian Harmonists did a much better version, but I could not find the youtube video. However, you can hear it here:
https://archive.org/download/ComedianHarmonists-41-50/ComedianHarmonists-IchFreuMichSo1937.mp3
https://archive.org/details/ComedianHarmonists-41-50


Ich freu mich so, ich freu mich so,
ich bin so glücklich und so froh
und weiß nicht mal warum,
und weiß nicht mal warum!
Es singt in mir, es klingt in mir
und was ich tu, gelingt bei mir -
und weiß nicht mal warum,
und weiß nicht mal warum!
Die Leute, die sagen:
'Wer Glück hat, ist dumm!',
die soll'n mal nicht fragen:
"Wieso, weshalb, warum?"
Ich freu mich so, ich freu mich so,
ich bin so glücklich und so froh
und weiß nicht mal warum,
und weiß nicht mal warum!

Oft hab' ich kein Geld -
wer kennt das nicht auf dieser Welt?
Doch ganz unbesorgt,
es kommt schon wer, der mir was borgt.
Ich kann die Leute nicht versteh'n
die durch die schwarze Brille seh'n.

Ich freu mich so, ich freu mich so ....


Other version by Fritz Weber:

 

Die Deutsche Wochenschau Nr748 1945 01 11, quoted (the aerial fight in the last 4 minutes) at the beginning of this excellent documentary I was watching:


From the combat flight simulator, I remember this situation (in the first video), where you approach an enemy airplane and you can't slow down, because you were going so much faster than them, so you have to shoot fast before you pass them. Yeah, I know the simulator has nothing to do with real airplanes, but I think the microsoft csf3 did an excellent job. And I don't mean just aesthetically.


Multi-player is the best. Unfortunately a few years ago they stopped the servers, so I stopped playing it.
 
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Remember how I said that all these things (scratching, and revenge trading itself) are just symptoms of a common cause.

I have yet to pinpoint the exact cause. But to do that, I first have to bring more examples of the things that cause me anger. I will write these examples as they come to my mind, in the future posts.

Then I will have to see what their common underlying cause is.

There will be dozens of examples.

I have a vague idea that the common underlying cause is a sense of injustice. But I may be wrong.

Let's start right now with the examples.

I get angry when the market goes in the opposite direction as the one I had forecast. How is this injustice? This does not qualify as injustice, or does it? Maybe this is all about the fact of ME being wronged rather than general injustices.

For example, I don't get mad if there is an abortion that kills a baby. That is an injustice, but I don't get mad.

This is the crux of everything, so I need a lot more reasoning on this. Mmh, let's see. More examples.

On the other hand, if I come to work and find garbage in the elevator. They're not doing anything to me, but I get mad.

So it's not only about what is done to me. But it is not either about all injustices in the world.

Maybe it is not about injustice.

More examples.

The orangutan colleague yawns loudly: I get angry.

Garbage on the floor, even in the street, beer bottles... angry. I will omit "angry" from here on because that is the nature of all these examples.

The cleaning lady irons my shirt or t-shirt with a mistake.

The cleaning lady steals jewelry.

I get stolen things at work.

I do not get angry if others are stolen things at work.

If I come across work done poorly and I don't have to deal with it, it amuses me.

If I come across poor work and I have to pay the consequences of it, it angers me.

Someone looks at me.

Someone laughs at me.

Someone calls me names.

Someone is being stupid or superficial or careless or untidy.

Stupidity angers me, but mind you, if you have the down syndrome and a low IQ, of course I won't get mad at you (instead I will do my best to help you), so this is more about a lack of reasoning and mental hard-work, rather than about how we're born.

Some more hypotheses. I thought this could all be about the fact that I was raised to believe in principles such as justice, hard work and being polite to others, and I get upset when I find out that others do not follow them. However, this is not the case with trading. If the market proves me wrong, I get just as angry. And we cannot argue that, by doing so, the market is being impolite, not hard-working, or unjust to me.

So, so far, I could only sum it all up by saying that I get angered "when things don't go my way".

But this would also imply that things don't go according to my expectations.

Now, at this point, I would think that I am very stupid to still expect, at my age, people to be honest and hard-work and meticulous. Furthermore, i would be that much more stupid to expect the markets to go my way.

So am I affected by some form of "egotistic" stupidity (expecting things to go your way) or is the underlying cause of my anger a different one?

I think I am stupid. I have also thought that the gods were with me and that things were going to work out in the end for me. This I have thought not only throughout my trading, with a great final disappointment, but also throughout my life.

But this illusion of being loved and that the world isn't just chaos and randomness might be inherent with living. In other words, are we really able to live without any of these illusions?

Should I try? I think I should try. I think there are people who live without these illusions.

I should try especially considering that I am paying for this illusion with all this anger and irrational behaviors.
 
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