MrStakhanovite wrote:I'm reading a post-humous publication of notes left by Wittgenstein called "On Certainty" for a class and I've pretty much had my fill of insane Austrians/Germans who leave angry scribbles behind that I'm supposed to derive meaning from. Here is a taste of the madness...
WTFBBQSauceYME wrote:74. Can we say: a mistake doesn't only have a cause, it also has a ground? I.e., roughly: when someone makes a mistake, this can be fitted into what he knows aright.
75. Would this be correct: If I merely believed wrongly that there is a table here in front of me, this might still be a mistake; but if I believe wrongly that I have seen this table, or one like it, every day for several months past, and have regularly used it, that isn't a mistake?
76. Naturally, my aim must be to give the statements that one would like to make here, but cannot make significantly.
77. Perhaps I shall do a multiplication twice to make sure, or perhaps get someone else to work it over. But shall I work it over again twenty times, or get twenty people to go over it? And is that some sort of negligence? Would the certainty really be greater for being checked twenty times?
78. And can I give a reason why it isn't?
This is how I want to turn in my next paper. Numbered aphorisms that are filled with half ideas.
I like the numbered aphorisms bit. But with full ideas or at least the ghost of them.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
I just finished Righteous Mind & Best of Enemies. Loved both of them. I am most of the way through Night Soldiers and about half way through Turner's bio of Brigham Young. I am struggling with Night Soldiers and really enjoying the Brigham Young book.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
Let me suggest this masterwork: Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians and the American Landscape. I can only hope my own work in this vein will some day be as good.
I'm having coffee with Jared this Saturday, too. Partly to professionally touch base and partly to interview him for a Mormon Studies blog.
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
Blixa wrote:Let me suggest this masterwork: Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians and the American Landscape. I can only hope my own work in this vein will some day be as good.
I'm having coffee with Jared this Saturday, too. Partly to professionally touch base and partly to interview him for a Mormon Studies blog.
Thanks, I ordered it along with Scattering Of The Saints: Schism Within Mormonism by Bringhurst
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
For Christmas I got three books. I haven't read a book in years and I don't really like books, but some discussions earlier in December led me to believe I've missed some developments in finance/macro in the last 15 years (lol) and probably had an incomplete foundation to begin with. Trying to fill it in with random blogs and papers hasn't helping much, so I'm going to allow for the reading of up to 10 popular books this year on the subject to fill in the background on what people are saying about the financial crisis, economics, and that sort of stuff. The books will be rated by three criteria: Entertainment value, quality of information, and command of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. All of these factors are somewhat independent. Here are the abbreviated ratings/reviews of the first two. The first three ordered were picked for first tier reading after considering about 15+ books on Amazon.
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
Entertainment: 10 Quality of information: 8 Command of EMH: 8
I doubt there's an easier pill to swallow for those who feel guilty for knowing nothing about the financial crisis, but at the same time, don't wish to read a dry exposition on collateral debt obligations and recent investment practices of banks. This book is hilarious. The quality of information is also high, for one, it tells the orthodox story of CDO's and sub-prime lending. Where it really shines, however, is getting into the lives of the fringe characters who were first to bet against the housing market and profited like crazy over all the defaults. They are the protagonists of the story. I had to knock off two points for the fact that there are several other sources equal or better for the base, non-character driven information. As for EMH, like every other book ever written besides for "A Random Walk Down Wallstreet" in the 60s, it rejects the theory out of hand, but Lewis is careful about making grand pronouncements and keeping the theory within the perspective of the characters. The dynamic between Michael Burry, the medical intern generally credited for first taking the housing "bubble" seriously and Joel Greenblatt, his mentor -- I had no idea Greenblatt would be part of the book when I bought it -- was masterful, and perfect for discussing EMH. There will be a post in a few weeks on this I'm sure. A couple points were docked for reasons I may bring up in the longer review. but I'm guessing this will be the best book of all I read this year.
The Quants, Scott Patterson
Entertainment: 8.2 Quality of information: 8.5 Command of EMH: 7.9
This book seemed like it would be the quickest access to an idea I was unfamiliar with, one that Analytics brought up discussing Vangaard, that high-speed arbitrage traders/computer models caused(?) or significantly contributed to the financial crises. To that end, this book was a good primer. Patterson draws out the personalities of a different cast of characters than Lewis, hedge fund managers, who were supossidly "responsible" for or "complicit" in the market meltdown. The emphasis is the failure of mathematical trading strategies to correctly model the market and ruin themselves and the market (?). One would think such a thesis would land the author pro EMH, which predicts that trading strategies don't work. Instead, the author essentially blames EMH for all of it, and following up online, he's pretty tame with his rhetoric considering sources he draws from apparently call for the imprisonment of University of Chicago professors -- good Lord.
At any rate, it's an entertaining book. The "whiz-bang" descriptions of math "studs" and their hubris gets a little overbearing, but whatever, it's still fun to read. I put the quality of information high because I couldn't find a popular book that predates Patterson's on this subject, one that carefully draws out the "hedge funds ruined Wall Street" (in the name of market efficiency) idea. Plus, he has some very compact descriptions of difficult concepts; his description of the synthetic CDO in about three sentences, for instance, or statistical arbitrage in a paragraph. As for EMH: He has a chapter describing hedge fund manager Cliff Asness taking a class from Eugene Fama, the guy who came up with EMH, that is so good I'd make it required reading if I were ever to teach a finance class. I'd give him a 10 for that. However, as he tries to slowly build his thesis of EMH as the root of the financial crisis, he ends of in a mass of inconsistencies. Also, unlike Lewis, for a biographical piece, he makes the mistake of building a "grand narrative" out of his story with EMH as the villain, ironically, repeating the mistake of allegations toward EMH that its simplicity is too convenient. If I create a blog I'll explain further.
The book I just started is More Money than God, by Sebastian Mallaby. I was going to review all three together, but this one is substantially longer and seems like it's going to be a real sleeper. I hope I'm wrong. I bought it because he takes a pro hedge fund position, and the book is a bestseller and rated good and all that. Of course, I can already tell the book is hotly anti-market efficiency, as every book ever written on finance is outside of "..Random Walk".
Probably up next are:
The Black Swan: Nassim Taleb An Inefficient Truth: Justin Fox
Anti-EMH goes without saying for these...
Last edited by Guest on Thu Jan 03, 2013 4:44 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
Gadianton wrote:For Christmas I got three books.......
Thanks for the book reviews—I look forward to your forthcoming longer reviews.
In addition to the three criteria of your reviews, I'd like to introduce a fourth way to evaluate the books: importance.
To illustrate the point, consider the following Google search:
site:soa.org "Big Short"
92 results came up—in all of the magazine, newsletter, journal entries, and conference presentations at the Society of Actuaries website, the term "Big Short" came up 92 times. That's impressive.
On to the second:
site:soa.org "Quants"
This search has 378 results. It probably overstates the importance of the book, because Scott Patterson didn't coin the term "quants", but it does show that "quants" is in the lexicon.
Now on to the third:
site:soa.org "black swan"
This comes back with 12,600 results. Not only has Taleb's "Black Swan" become a major term in the lexicon, it's changed the way actuaries think. That book is truly seminal.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.