The option was sold and backed by the bank at which the author worked, and he didn't personally lose $200 million. Seems like he's still very much deep in the illusion of control.
He designed the structure, participated in negotiating the deal, advocated for it with both internal and external parties, was entrusted to care for the deal, and is ultimately the primary responsible party for the deal in question and for the company's gains or losses associated with the deal. The language is not exactly a stretch.
> ultimately the primary responsible party for the deal in question
Unless he personally lost $200 million, or he somehow needs to pay it back to the bank, then no, he is not ultimately responsible for the deal at all.
What you are saying is that it might have felt that way to him because of his involvement and that it's understandable to feel that way. And that's ok. But it is also very tone deaf to use that language in an article about supposedly dispelling the illusion of control.
I'm responsible for expensive systems at work, and many of them have a value in excess of my entire net worth. At no point am I liable beyond possibly losing my job if I screw up and damage those systems.
Again, you are deviating the issue by bringing up the responsibility/liability issue. I'm not arguing that.
If anything, you are essentially making my point. The guy in the story was not liable for the $200 million (beyond his job), hence he didn't personally lose the money, even though he says "I lost $200 million".
Excuse me. We use English on Hacker News. We do not use Lojban. Because we use English, we will as a group continue to use terms such as "responsible" in the normal manner of the English language. No one has ever said that this was extraordinarily precise.
This is one such use. Your hair-splitting complaints are not particularly appropriate to this forum as they do not effectively serve to make its communication more effective; nor do I have any reason to believe they are they an effective psychological marker of responsibility and the illusion of control as you assert.
He thought he had skin in the game, his bonus, and maybe his job, but both of those items were also out of his control, he just didn’t understand that. So much for that PhD.
Thinking about it, I think you're right: He felt invested, he felt in control. It was illusory. Perhaps his title hints at it, but the "how to give it up" is the falsity in the title. The illusory control needs to be recognised as never having existed.
The illusion of control and how to recognise you never had it
Maybe it was also my misreading: what he gave up was the illusion.
(Btw I did read the article, the above reads like I commented on the HN headline)
In many situations an accompanying PhD in psychology or neuroscience would be useful.
EDIT - I'm throttled (I imagine due to comments like the following), so cannot reply below:
> Nobody needs a phd to understand that circumstances and chance have a much bigger influence...
Some depth in psychology and neurology can also help one realize that you do not actually know the thoughts and abilities of other people - rather, this is how the mind evolved to perceive and model the external world (persons, etc), and how the subconscious communicates predictions based on that model to the conscious mind.
So, I maintain my assertion that an understanding of how the mind (that which most substantially differentiates us from all other living things) works has great utility.
it's a cultural malaise, not a scientific one. Nobody needs a phd to understand that circumstances and chance have a much bigger influence, and that the complexity of playing with hundreds of millions in global markets goes far beyond the capacity of any individual. Picking up Goethe's Sorcerer's Apprentice should be good enough.
I think he essentially means the illusion of being able to predict the future with any accuracy. That's the issue underlying the failure to control the situation with financial tricks.
> means the illusion of being able to predict the future with any accuracy.
"Am I the master of my destiny?" is the real question behind the illusion of control.
Am I succeeding because of my skill, talent and actions or just lucky? What part is due to luck and which is due to my skill?
He points out that the illusion of control is necessary because reality could cause depression, making people too paralyzed to act and therefore making bad situations worse.
I don't get the finance mindset, you don't have access to any of the information or actions that make the squiggly line of price go up or down. Deriving models from natural phenomenon and applying them in a completely unrelated field looks to be a gamble no matter how you cut it.
We are all going into the unknown all the time, predicting the future is not a solvable problem, but you can train yourself to aim better from past attempts.
In chess, one has perfect information and the game is deterministic. In cards, one is at the mercy of the deck and the distribution, so one plays according to the odds.
Chess is an old game. Starcraft is the updated version of chess, with build orders and hidden information. Starcraft retains the value of doing the right thing even when blind, and building up logical series of actions from past experience.
I don't know if you get to choose between chess and cards. In Starcraft (and chess to a lesser degree) you still have risks in the unknown that can be mapped as a probability function. For a given build order you may know that the best unit is X, but there's still a chance your opponent produces a unit that is counter-valent to the optimal.
In finance or cards you still have information about concrete events like ipo launch dates and cards have chips that are always shown and a number of cards remaining, that do not require probabilities to know or exploit.
Which one takes more prominence depends on the task at hand. And if one is prominent, the other strategy is nestled inside and shrouds from above.
Also in cards, you're often playing against other humans who are bluffing and lying in order to win, whereas this is not possible in a perfect information game like Chess.
Illusion of the degree of control. Giving up agency and going towards external locus-of-control like people who say everything is "God's will" rather than proactively mitigating risks is another form of learned helplessness.
You can't stop the sun from rising but you can stop the raccoons from using your trash cans as a salad bar.
But let's face it Wall St. makes money betting with low latency (or advanced notice) market data and news, insider info, and through complex chicanery to hide strats about said betting. It's moving value around into different peoples' pockets while maintaining a pretense of functioning as a funding and value conversion platform.
> it occurred to me that Mexico might be willing to restructure its deal—selling us back the option it owned, and buying a new one—in a way that would lock in billions of profits for the country, while giving me a much needed windfall too
I don't get it, how would this be profitable for the bank?
"The option they bought from me"
The option was sold and backed by the bank at which the author worked, and he didn't personally lose $200 million. Seems like he's still very much deep in the illusion of control.