Supervenes

felixsalmon: Love this cartoon(via Letter to a Young Social...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:48:53 -0400

Love this cartoon
(via Letter to a Young Social Entrepreneur: the poor are not the raw material for your salvation | Pioneers Post)

Behavioral Macro: Everything you think you know about the Fed is wrong

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:33:45 -0400

Behavioral Macro: Everything you think you know about the Fed is wrong:

markdow:

by Mark Dow and Michael Sedacca

Few would still argue against the assertion that the Federal Reserve has been central to the financial stabilization and economic recovery from the 2008 crisis. They fixed the plumbing and are now trying to incentivize animal spirits to pump water through the…

USD > BTC; QED

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:07:21 -0400

Bitcoin exchanges exist on servers that exist at physical locations in nation-states. Nation-states have monopolies on the use of legitimate force and have the power to tax. So any state that feels its currency threatened by BTC can punitively tax/seize servers in its territory and block access to servers outside its territory from outgoing traffic from ISPs within its territory.

So any BTC exchange that isn’t peer to peer hosted (would that even work?) will either never be a threat to any national currencies, or will not exist for long if it is. Thoughts?

If it takes you 600 words of throat-clearing to even approach the book you are ostensibly reviewing,...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:14:47 -0400

If it takes you 600 words of throat-clearing to even approach the book you are ostensibly reviewing, maybe something has gone wrong. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38530-badiou-and-philosophy/

csen: Solutions to Our Looming Full Employment Crisis

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 10:28:38 -0400

csen: Solutions to Our Looming Full Employment Crisis:

csen:

As hard as it is to imagine today, by 2017 the United States is likely to have a different employment crisis on its hands — effective full employment, with very little peak-age slack labor available, and no prospects for labor force growth on the horizon. A couple charts will help paint this…

You are a feared reviewer of other technology pundits’ books … you demolished Jeff...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:24:47 -0400

You are a feared reviewer of other technology pundits’ books … you demolished Jeff Jarvis’s book Public Parts, called Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography “pedestrian”, you regularly ridicule internet consultant Clay Shirky via Twitter – do you enjoy a fight?

They don’t like to fight, that’s the problem. They are ripe for ridiculing because they are ridiculous in many cases, and the only reason they are advancing is because they plug in the conceptual and theoretical holes in their theories with buzzwords that have no meaning – “openness” or “the sharing economy” – what on earth is the sharing economy?

What I’ve tried to do in my reviews is engage seriously with these bullshit concepts, as if they were serious – to see whether an idea such as “cognitive surplus”, of which Clay Shirky is very fond, has any meaning at all. I do close readings of things that aren’t meant to be read very closely. That is how our technology discourse works, there are lots of great bloggers, soundbites and memes, but once you start putting them together you realise that they don’t add up. And making people aware that they don’t add up is a useful public function.

Evgeny Morozov: “We are abandoning all the checks and balances”

“Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 20:41:21 -0500

“Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process information,” “send signals,” and “receive messages”—as if this were as uncontroversial as electrical and chemical processes occurring in the brain. We need to scrutinize such talk with care. Why exactly is it thought that the brain can be described in these ways? It is a collection of biological cells like any bodily organ, much like the liver or the heart, which are not apt to be described in informational terms. It can hardly be claimed that we have observed information transmission in the brain, as we have observed certain chemicals; this is a purely theoretical description of what is going on. So what is the basis for the theory?”

Colin McGinn, Homunculism

“Apart from vintage photographs in which scientists discerned the trails left by a positron or...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:31:17 -0500

“Apart from vintage photographs in which scientists discerned the trails left by a positron or an Omega-minus particle on the move, most of the entities Bernstein writes about are best “depicted” as mathematical formulae.”

McLemee review of Bernstein, “A Palette of Particles”

Here are some terms in current analytic metaphysics. Each term or phrase refers to a view about what...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:10:55 -0500

Here are some terms in current analytic metaphysics. Each term or phrase refers to a view about what there is or the way in which some things exist:

metaphysical indeterminacy
ontic vagueness
vague existence
indeterminate existence
vague identity

These are all meant to pick out distinct views, though sometimes “metaphysical indeterminacy” is treated as an umbrella term incorporating all of the others. Examples of views picked out by these sorts of terms include:

There is some thing and it is indeterminate whether the thing exists.
Determinately, there is some thing that is the sum of a and b.
It is vague which things exist.
It is indeterminate whether a = b.
Object a determinately exists but it is vague what the boundaries of a are.

This literature is often confusing. Careful writing helps, and formalization helps even more, except that sometimes after you have made some progress in a formal logical capacity, when it comes time to translate the results back into ordinary English, confusion resumes.

"I follow them down Avenue A. The Lower East Side, I notice, has not changed much in one hundred..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:26:50 -0500

“I follow them down Avenue A. The Lower East Side, I notice, has not changed much in one hundred years. The women are still emaciated and dressed in rags; the men still wear beards and have sad eyes.”

- Simon Rich’s Sell Out, part one of four. : The New Yorker (via yourmonkeycalled)

Efficient Market Hypothesis

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:23:55 -0500

I got a call this week from a potential client that was so textbook, I thought for a minute that it was a prank.

The man ✓, a dentist ✓, had taken over his own investments after losing money with conventional asset managers in 2000 and 2008.

He said that he had bought a large position a year or two ago in VXX ”without really looking at what it was.” ✓ Then he explained that the government was manipulating the markets. ✓ He obviously has lost a fair amount of money over the last several months and was calling for help in “repairing” his long volatility position.

I assumed he was looking for a less costly way to hedge his stocks against some perceived risk scenario, so I talked for a minute about different hedging approaches. But I was mistaken: he clarified that this was a straight-up speculative bet against the market.

Someone interrupted on his end and he said he “had to go finish a root canal,” and then we talked to for several minutes more about some alternatives. FWIW, I told him to do the near-opposite of his current approach.

People on Twitter sometimes say, in a snarky way, that the negative carry (or worse) from gold or short Treasuries or VXX or etc is a tax on stupidity - the cost of making financial bets based on false ideas about how the economy works. I’m trying to be kinder in general this year, and raw “stupidity” isn’t exactly the problem anyway, but the observation does seem to hold true.

“Most of them are only working on the weekends.” “Look, a lot of the stuff they...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:39:30 -0500

“Most of them are only working on the weekends.”

“Look, a lot of the stuff they sent up from Miami last fall was unusable.”

“He says he wants to hire more people, but he won’t take on any college kids.”

“Maybe they could move some of this on Ebay.”

Eavesdropping on this eyebrow-raising conversation between a dowdy middle-aged couple proved pointless when it turned out they were talking about consultations performed for regional rug dealers.

gerrycanavan: Benjamin and Brecht play chess.

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:08:10 -0500

gerrycanavan:

Benjamin and Brecht play chess.

“Capitalism III: Laissez Faire—Qui les a laissé? It should not be forgotten that the theory of...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:46:57 -0500

“Capitalism III: Laissez Faire—Qui les a laissé?

It should not be forgotten that the theory of the most coercive and totalized institution known to humanity, the theory of the state, is the correlary and remedy of a condition of unrestrained self- interest—as in Hobbes, or for that matter St. Augustine. The theory reminds us that an enormous system of social control is required to maintain the laissez-faire, the “free” play of self-interest, of a capitalist nation-state. To think otherwise would be like supposing that the feudal knights once charging around the countryside had fashioned their own armor and mounted their horses all by themselves.”

-Marshall Sahlins, Waiting for Foucault, Still

How to write the opening to an NDPR review of a non-Anglophone philosopher

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 22:28:18 -0500

After decades of toil in relative obscurity, X’s work is finally being appreciated by Americans. X is well-known for his short, accessible treatise on y, published by Verso some years back, but the depth of his knowledge of the history of philosophy and the creativity of his own work has hitherto gone unrecognized. Finally, in a series of translations published over the last twelve months, we can now admit X as a genius on par with les trois H and a contemporary without peer. [500 or so more words of this; do not omit mention of any film interviews or treatments, art-world liasons, or political projects.]

With the application of [neologism or metaphor], a concept appearing only in the later, more poetic works, X allows us to affirm a rigorous metaphysics of [adjective with positive connotations, preferably social/political] [safe noun]. Controversy over the early X’s admission of the legitimacy of the state response to…[some more intellectual history of X]

[discussion of influences, X’s position in squabbles among peers or influences]

[long discussion of X’s use of concepts and neologisms to stipulate which things in the world are good and which are bad, but obviously couched in X’s own jargon]

[in the last 200 words, the gesture of an attempt at presenting and evaluating X’s arguments to some conclusion, if any]

I think the new years' goals of reading and math and finance, econ, probabiliyt, philosophy, and so on are harder to define goals for. In part because I don't know how long it takes to achieve something (think: how long will your thesis take? when you don't even know what it's going to be on yet). But in part because it's so addiction-driven. Any math or philosophy thing I read is purely out of an addictive instinct and not rational business planning or execution.

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:02:10 -0500

That makes sense if your motivation isn’t pragmatic. I just want to understand FI better so that I can keep up in conversations with peers. But about that “addictive instinct” - it sounds like it’s a negative thing for you, but some people regard learning some subjects as intrinsically valuable/enjoyable?

Also breaking things down into parts is helpful for me - maybe “start a dissertation” is too vague but not “have 3 viable topic ideas by March 1.”

I forget if I told you this but my sense of my own free will is like that second order way. I can sometimes choose and sometimes I just follow my Hebbian path I already dug for myself. So I had more first-order free will as a child (forming habits when I _really_ didn't know what to do or make me happy or what's good). So setting good goals is almost 3rd-order. And once elderly I'll maybe know what I should have done but have almost no free will left as habit took over.

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:54:57 -0500

Maybe you need to dumb things down a bit and get “in the moment” (first order will) more often? Like if, in John Stuart Mill’s draft version of the hierarchy, there was a pig satisfied (worse), then Socrates dissatisfied (better), but then Socrates reflecting constantly on his own dissatisfaction (worst)?

My wife asked me to XBMC-up the movie Pitch Perfect before I...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 00:47:08 -0500

My wife asked me to XBMC-up the movie Pitch Perfect before I went out the other night. I mis-heard and did not question her choice.

Isomorphismes: New Year's Resolutions

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:22:13 -0500

Isomorphismes: New Year's Resolutions:

isomorphismes:

supervenes and I were discussing our New Year’s resolutions. He said he partitions people into those who:

already work on their goals without NYE resolution or “wipe the slate clean” dreams — they don’t need a New Year to follow through on their goals

set goals they won’t actually follow…

I do like the idea of New Year’s resolutions that involve second-order decision making, like “I’m going to use this software/calendar to keep track of x.” Even though people only really care about the x, it seems like the second-order will is what determines success. Harry Frankfurt-style.

Audio

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:33:41 -0500