Contrarian

Reading contrarian reviews of books, movies etc. is usually as or more informative and quicker than reading the majority opinion.

So much about consistency

Ask a physicist, he'll tell you nature is efficient and minimalist; ask a biologist, he'll tell you it's inefficient and wasteful.

Can you falsify

Sam Harris is the author of the book "Free Will". The central point of his book is that free will is an illusion, because the reason of every our action are completely removed from our control and - even - our consciousness.

In other words: "I may be able to choose, but I cannot choose what I choose"

This way of framing the problem (as any other way, I admit) has a side that bothers me, as expressed by the following (Popper inspired) question:

"Is it possible to imagine an entity that is given free will in a sense that complies with the above objection?"

The problem is - obviously - that I cannot (and I'd like to ask Sam Harris). If the answer is indeed that such an entity cannot exist then we need to ask to ourselves if the reason is that the above objection is self-satisfying and therefore not very helpful (sort of saying "black is black" when asked to define black: true but trivially so) ? Or is the idea of free will intrinsically meaningless (like the "heigth of sweetness")? Or - finally - is the underlying definition of free will so bad that we need to go back to the drawing board before discussing its existence?

I rather tend to side with the third possibility, to which the first one may perhaps be reduced. The second remains a possibility, but it begs further explanations - after all, we do not spend much time debating the height of sweetness.

The problem wih music

Next time you hear someone complaining about how internet/piracy/(whatever) hurts music/movies/literature, and that someone happens to be part of the industry, think of this article.

The Problem With Music
by Steve Albini

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course. (Read all...)

Happy Birthday, Charles.

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?"


-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Prospero

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

De super cordis - On superstrings

Having read Brian Greene's "The elegant universe" and thumbed through his "The Hidden Reality", I feel the irresistible urge to paraphrase a well known sentence(*) as

"When all you think of are strings, every solution looks like a knot"

*)"When all you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail"

--

Avendo letto "L'universo Elegante" e aver sfogliato "La realtà Nascosta" di Brian Greene, non posso evitare di parafrasare un famoso detto(*):

"Quando tutto ciò a cui pensi sono stringhe, ogni soluzione sembra un nodo"

*) "Quando tutto quello che hai è un martello, tutti i problemi ti sembrano chiodi"

G'bye, Paul Motian

There's a Million songs, out there

R.I.P: Dennis Ritchie

/*
* Dennis Ritchie,
* inventor of the C programming language and
* of the Unix Operating System, dies at 70.
*/
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void){
printf("goodbye world :( \n");
return(70);
}

Geeks bearing gifts - to Wall Street (Pablo Triana pt.2)

So, having drank Triana's book to the dregs, and to wrap my previous post's point up, this is the apparent message of Triana ruminations(*):

"Dear Reader.

I represent that crowd of worldly, fascinating, experienced, master-of-the-universe types that run the trading floors and the financial institutions in Wall Street and elsewhere. Given some recent unfortunate events, you may be under the misapprehension that we need to shoulder blame (and pay some amount of retribution) for a number of recent unfortunate events that have led to the worst world economic crisis since 1929.

Not so! Let me explain.

We - the street-wise, non quant-oriented traders - are the good guys (in spite of what that Oliver Stone guy would have you believe). Really. True, some of us may occasionaly exhibit some obnoxious traits as the pink-tied guy that went recently public saying that Goldman-Sachs rules the world, but that's just what we call good natured fun.

So where are the guilty parties? I have thoroughly researched this question, and am now able to unveil the secret.

It was the quants.

Who are the quants, you may be asking. The quants are geeks. Outsiders. Most of them have science diplomas, PhDs even. Being geeks, they are unworldly, weird, given to math, computer programming and other boring, unglitzy and menial occupations. Quants used to be behaved and subservient: stayed in the back rooom, ran the computer systems, mopped the floors and made themselves generally useful to us dealmakers, occasionally basking in (dim) reflected light. The also had low paychecks, as it befits this type of lowlife.

Alas, unbeknown to most of us, two large foundations (FORD and Carnegie) in 1959 gave us money (We may be nice guys, but we cannot resist money. Who can, honestly) to sneak inside all the B-schools around the US some uebergeeks (Black, Merton, Scholes, et. al.). Once they were in, they started churning out all this crazy math and sending it to the trading floors, were the quants got ideas inside their heads, got uppity, and put that same crazy math inside our computers. Then they made it use them (the computers) and they were showing all kind of terrific numbers and returns, and fees and money we could make.

And so we did. But the numbers were fake. The evil uppity quants had taken us for a ride with their Gaussian, copulas, VaRs and schmaRs. So the market crashed, and - by the way it looks now - it may not recover for the rest of our lives.

Why did we believe the quants, you ask. Well, as kids, most of us wanted to grow up a scientist: wear a white coat, say amazingly intelligent things, go to planets with severe looking, pointy ears aliens, and get the girl at the end. Then the movie stories changed, we found out we liked money more than science, became worldly and savy and intuitive and bought a suit - and we were still getting the girl - not to mention the money, and stuff. But deep inside us, we harbored this science yearning, and so the uebergeeks wilily exploited our gentle side with their scientist prestige. How were we to know they were actual dr. Strangleloves, all of them? Plus we were actually asking them to churn out those models and put them on our computers so we could make money, see?

But wait. We may be nice, but we are not stupid. It's not like we believed the models. We knew they were utter poppycock most of the time (though it galled us that many of the geeks were now making the same money we did by using those very same models). Why were we using them, you ask. Why, we were using them as an excuse to gorge on risk, so we could make more money and award ourselves more fees, that should be obvious. What were we doing before 1959 - without models and quants and stuff? Well, obviously we made money, awarded ourselves fees, and crashed the market all the same, we just used other excuses - oh, and crashes were not so quick, because we did not have computers then. But this is really beside the point, a digression, I'd say. So let's not digress.

What do we do now, you want to know? Let me tell you what - I've got it all figured out.

We need to put worldly, fascinating, experienced, pink-tied, master-of-the-universe "deal makers" and "punters" (like me) back in the driving seat. Runaway quants will be disciplined - hanging a few by the neck on the trading floor will be a nice warning for the others. They'll return to the backroom to reboot computers, make us coffee and mop the floor. We'll kick the uebergeeks out of B-school, so we can free up tenured posts for ourselves when we get close to retirement as masters of the Universe.

Meanwhile, we'll put the economy back in shape, just the way it was in 1920s - no, wait, bad date, you want to get around that '29 thing - I meant, the 1950s. Trust us. The system's got nothing to do with all the troubles. It was the quants. The geeks. The Geeks Bearing Gifts. We will know them in the future and we will fear them, and we will not let them in.

Did they have quants in the Netherlands around 1637, you ask. Of course not, that's absurd, they did not even have computers then. So what about tulip mania, you ask? Sorry, but we really don't have time for digressions, around here. By the way, are you a socialist?

And, 'ow about those gov'ment bonds over there, fellas?
"(**)

(*) I am more or less convinced that Triana is using his "kill the quant" theory as a smoke screen to hide the total systemic failure of the contemporary economic system. I am equally convinced that a lot - possibly all - the econometric models that have been used in quant finance are fragile. And I have a strong suspect that Taleb may be right - no modeling may be possible.

(**) Contains sarcasm.