160 chars: Unity

Is there any point in Unity if it's not in opposition to something?

Looking for the Magic Answer

From Looking for the Magic Answer, interview with Noam Chomsky, 17 years ago:

The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still -- really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them -- is, "It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer." The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, "Get to work on it."

There are a thousand different ways to get to work on it. For one thing, there's no "it." There's lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that's what you're focused on, you're going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment's in serious danger. There's no one thing that's the right thing to do. It depends on what your interests are and what's going on and what the problems are, and so on. And you have to deal with them. There's very little that anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can, but it's marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more support. That's the way everything happens, whether it's small changes or huge changes.

If there is a magic answer, I don't know it. But it sounds to me as if the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and acting suggests -- I'm sure this is unfair -- "Tell me something that's going to work pretty soon or else I'm not going to bother, because I've got other things to do." Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it's worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.

Inside Job

Finally saw Inside Job the other day, and it did pretty well in explaining what seemed to have happened. I felt that more could have been put at the door of the ratings agencies - private companies whose function is written into law, lets not forget. For example look at the graph in this Reuters blog post by Felix Salmon - is shows the world issue of AAA bonds since the 1990s. They went from non-existent to being about half of all issued bonds by 2006. As Felix says:

That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk.

An article in today's Guardian about the Black-Scholes equation is also pretty interesting. Ian Stewart (Professor of Maths at Warwick) points out that the financial industry has repeatedly used equations beyond their stated limits and then got us all into a mess. His paragraph at the end caught my eye:

Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don't represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable.

This ties into my earlier blue-screen metaphor for the crash, but also his statements that the stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere gave me a jolt. Having grown up in the 80s I guess I'd internalised the conventional wisdom that over the longer term the stock market is always a good bet. But if you look at the recent era, the era of super fast transactions and derivatives, it certainly no longer seems to be the case. Since the mid 90's the FTSE 100 has just been bouncing from about 3500 to about 6500 and back again. If you look for an inflation adjusted FTSE 100 it looks even bleaker. But in the meantime, the trend has been for people to base more and more of their savings and mortgages on stock-market products. Hmmmm.

Edge is a Conversation?

Something about Edge bothers me - it bills itself as a 'Conversation' and supposedly its all about getting smart people to talk to each other. According to the Guardian, its the "world's smartest website" and its partially based on the ideas of James Lee Byars - "gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves"

So it makes it sound like its based on dialogue ... That would indeed be a fantastic site. Socrates showed us how to arrive at the truth through dialogue. And as Wittgenstein said "A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring".

But the reality of Edge seems to be occasional open questions, with long essays for answers, and none of the thinkers ever being challenged on what they said or entering into a dialogue with any of the others.

If they really want to advance knowledge, it should be a forum, where maybe only certain people are allowed to post, but everyone is allowed to read. Then we'd get some really interesting discussions.

They are missing this obvious direction (allowing dialogue) in such a huge way that it must be a deliberate ommission. In its current form, Edge seems more optimised towards selling books than advancing knowledge.

(Originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

160 chars: Complexity in finance

Good article: Why is finance so complex? http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html  Answer: To fool people into taking more risk then they realise they are taking

Mandatory Banking

Here's a question I've been pondering that I'd like to throw out for the economists - my understanding is that although people tend to think of the money in their bank account as 'theirs', in practice they have 'lent' the money to the bank who then lend it to other people but promise to give it back to the lender if they need it (as often noted, a promise they can only keep under certain conditions). So really the money is only 'theirs' if they keep it under their mattress or something.

Now, it seems that in the modern world, for all intents and purposes, having a bank account is pretty much vital if you want to do anything at all - e.g. try getting your employer to pay your salary if you don't have a bank account - so we now live in a society where lending money to banks is (for all intents and purposes) mandatory. I have a feeling this should change our whole concept of what money is and several of the fundamental principles underpinning it. So: How does 'mandatory' banking affect the theory of money?

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)

Steve Jobs

In about 2000, Douglas Adams wrote a really good essay (called 'Turncoat', in the Salmon of Doubt) about how he saw the torch of zeitgeist moving from pop music (the Beatles) through to comedy (Monty Python, whose stardom rose as the Beatles faded) and then on to ... technological innovation. Its partly an essay about being disillusioned with comedy, but also an essay about Douglas's conversion to being a fan of technology rather than a satirist of it.

So he makes the case that the people really doing the cool stuff these days are not the pop stars or the performers (I mean, music is great but when's the last time that music changed the world? Thirty years ago?), but the people building new ways for us to communicate and play and work together.

So for people wondering why so many people feel so affected by Steve Job's death - its because we're living in the future, and the people inventing new stuff in tech and on the internet are as important to our culture as pop stars were in the 60s.

(originally a comment on this metafilter thread)