What I think about knowledge
I have done a lot of formal studying, and a great deal of reading, throughout my life. I am someone who contextualises everything, to find strands of commonality or links of connection: I subscribe to Quine's "web of belief" approach to knowledge. My experience is that those who opine grandiosely about something are often found wanting for substance when the surface is scratched; and that those who know a thousand trivial facts can sometimes fail to understand that they can't all be true at once. Getting both the big picture and the details in place is the only way true knowledge and insight can be reached.
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Here's an example: Communism is an "ideal" that appeals to many people simplistically. Its "fairness" - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs - is in fact something that strikes many, in real life, as deeply unfair. Why should effort and talent not be rewarded? It's unfair for freeloaders to ride the success of others. And so the conflict of a controlling political system managing all citizens' lives, that is at odds with the deep-rooted psychology of humans, pervades. Crises always happen that bring this to a head and it fails - popular uprisings, the bankruptcy of a failed arms race against a richer nation, war. And while the original thinking of Karl Marx had intellectual validity in its own time the battle of labour versus capital has largely been settled through the combination of capitalism and democracy (individual poverty has been effectively eradicated in the West, contemporaneously with immense growth in aggregate wealth), rendering moot his argument for communism. So the empirical observations of the (social) scientific method, meeting a core conceptual rationale for why these observations arise, brings to my mind a definitive argument that communism is both wrong and a practical impossibility. This is, I think, a fact, and those who keep saying it's just a question of better implementation are idiots. China will fail, eventually (I don't know when and I don't know how, but its controlling totalitarianism cannot endure).
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Anyway - that's an example of reasoning one's way with a combination of conceptual logic and garnering the factual details to a piece of knowledge. If you read what I write here a lot of it is either or both of these things together, and hopefully the various strands will cohere in a way so as not to conflict with each other. Themes such as incentives, game-theoretical thinking, brute logic, probabilistic reasoning, the scientific method of induction, Bayesian responses of updating one's knowledge based on emerging evidence - these will repeat like motifs.
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I have had a three-decade career in business and finance, and my reflections in these fields are curated separately. This section is for everything else.
Formal qualifications
1990-1993
Mathematics, University of Oxford. Earned BA degree, later converted to unearned MA (Oxon)
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1st class
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At school I did well in both humanities and science subjects. Maths appealed to me (and I had great teachers who inspired me) so I chose this to study at university. I later came to realise it's more an art than a science, especially the pure mathematics that I specialised in.
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I earned a first-class degree, coming 6th in my year of 250 candidates (and 51 firsts in total).
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1999
Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries
Professional qualification
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The actuarial qualification is one undertaken while working, like law or accountancy. The average time is seven years (having already achieved an undergraduate degree), for it is a very gruelling set of examinations which almost nobody sails through unscathed by failure. It's a broad financial qualification with a strong quantitative underpin, but also brings in economics, business, corporate finance, investment analysis, risk analysis, regulation and accounting. Some reckon it is the hardest professional qualification there is.
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2000-2002
MBA, London Business School
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Distinction
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I felt that with a maths degree and actuarial qualification I was in danger of being tarred with a purely technical brush and wanted to broaden the base of my formal learning. I was mistaken: the parts of the MBA others considered hard, the technical subjects, amounted to around one tenth of what the actuarial qualification had taught me; the softer topics, like HR, culture, strategy, are either pure waffle and fad or are taught with case studies we slavishly follow (I wrote a glowing paper on Enron, before its scandalous collapse). It wasn't worth it, given my background, though I wouldn't say it was a worthless degree for someone with less training than me. There are hundreds of courses in the UK alone and it is essential to choose a good school: LBS was the top in Europe and one of the top ten in the world (I dread to think how easy the course is at lower-ranked schools).
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I earned a distinction, though that was a bit of a joke: I'd failed an early course through laziness (later re-sat and passed) which at the time they told me disqualified me from an overall distinction grade; then they awarded me one anyway.
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