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What books/works have most influenced your views on politics?
firetown
10-17-2008, 01:48 AM
The Bible. Passages I read long ago, but didn't really understand. Now that I'm starting to it is and will be the book of books for me.
The Bible. Passages I read long ago, but didn't really understand. Now that I'm starting to it is and will be the book of books for me.
Care to elaborate? :)
firetown
10-17-2008, 08:20 AM
When I was a child, I was raised in a way that God was used to put fear in me. I went to church and Bible study out of fear of going to hell without really understand what Jesus was all about.
kerrin
10-17-2008, 04:54 PM
What books/works have most influenced your views on politics?
The Constitution of the United States
Various writings of Thomas Jefferson
Some of the federalist papers
Critical Rationalism - David Miller
The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Critical Realism: Essential Readings - Various Authors
Austrian School of Economics (not political but so much of politics these days is driven by economic policy)
What about you Alex? I know your a Nietzsche fan, what else? BTW: You are, existentially speaking, ÜberAlex. ;)
What about you Alex? I know your a Nietzsche fan, what else? BTW: You are, existentially speaking, ÜberAlex. ;)
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli
Two Treatises of Government - John Locke
On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism and Other Essays - John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
The Road to Serfdom, Individualism and Economic Order - F.A. Hayek
Capitalism and Freedom - Milton Friedman
Conscience of a Conservative - Barry Goldwater
*chuckle* I actually created that YIM handle to torment my husband years ago.
kerrin
10-17-2008, 11:18 PM
That's a damn good list! I forgot Locke in my list.
...torment my husband years ago
Yes! I love it! You should have been my sister growing up. I find so much enjoyment from tormenting—my friends say I have perfected the art.
What about the YIM torments him? Is he not a fan of Nietzsche?
Yes! I love it! You should have been my sister growing up. I find so much enjoyment from tormenting—my friends say I have perfected the art.
Hades help anyone who was my sibling growing up. I was a truly evil wench.
What about the YIM torments him? Is he not a fan of Nietzsche?
He was fine with Nietzsche's philosophy but REALLY disliked the way Nietzsche phrased and presented his ideas. Reading Nietzsche seemed torturous to him.
A German we both knew would whine about the missing umlaut in my husband's handle. He felt the word uber needed either an umlaut or an extra e (i.e. ueber).
A German we both knew would whine about the missing umlaut in my husband's handle. He felt the word uber needed either an umlaut or an extra e (i.e. ueber).
Roman is certainly my favorite pedant on the planet. (sorry folks, inside remark)
I'm now thoroughly curious how far your appreciation of Friedman goes....
This is mainly due to a possible conflict of your passion for nonlinear dynamics being at odds with Friedman's rather linear view of probabilities, in the sense that they are an additive limit approaching Unity.
While my desire for reductionism really wants to believe it (the free market) is as simple as a summation of independent, random variables as Friedman espoused, I just think it all breaks down when you apply this model to an aggregate time series: in other words, it might work fine for analysis of a narrow-enough period, but buckles in the presence of the weight of the full dimension of time.
When you stretch the integral over a longer time period, the interdependency of the variables intensifies, and so the effect of a change in one variable necessarily amplifies across the entire dataset. These effects are of the type expressed in the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and others. This general concept is highly at odds with Friedman's attempt to fit everything into a normal statistical distribution. I think his view simply misunderstands the true effect of "the human factor" in a free market over time. Unfortunately, the effect is truly staggering, to the point of rendering standard statistical models more-or-less completely irrelevant in the presence of humans, as vulnerable to the influence of "the herd" as many of us are, as the prime movers behind most of the supposedly-random variables.
All of the above said, I'm not sure that there *is* a valid solution, where a stable-yet-nonstatic (nee perpetually growing) global economy is the goal. I guess I'm trying to say that there is a time and place for all philosophies (at least where the eternally-nebulous field of economics is concerned), and furthermore, that we cannot necessarily know what the proper time/place is because hindsight is an utterly unforgiving bitch. It's as though the policy-setters need to constantly be in almost-polar opposition to whatever the herd is doing in order to almost-offset their unavoidable inertia (the delta in the offset representing growth). Seems a rather untenable position, to me. Particularly so, given that the principle of a representative republic implies that the people select overlords that are theoretically in line with their views (ha!) and that by the time the "people have spoken" in the context of a simple majority having selected a marginally-acceptable overlord, it's too late and the direction of policy should already be headed in, well, the other direction.
So, I suppose the reality is that crashes happen, and we should all keep large sacks of beans close at hand, because it's no guarantee that even large sacks of hard currency will always be of much, if any, use. It's all just too, err, nonlinear to be any other way :confused:
Sorry to fly so wildly off the handle over a single line-item on your list of influential literary works. I'm certainly in the camp of his philosophy of libertarian self-determinism, but happen to think that there are significant, potentially-unresolvable issues when it comes to "governing" a "free market" (mmm, oxymorons) per his prescription. The key term, to me, in the Friedman philosophy is: SELF.
I would highly (read: HIGHLY) recommend reading the works of Nassim Taleb, particularly Fooled By Randomness and, if you have the stomach to go further down the rabbit hole, Black Swan, for some painfully depressing yet well-written, very readable, thoughts on the subject. He touches heavily on social psychology, which really gets at the heart of the matter, I think. Put another (rather cynical) way, the concept of the global economy is really just one big confidence scam.
xoxo,
-eric
Roman is certainly my favorite pedant on the planet. (sorry folks, inside remark)
Not touching that one with a ten foot schnitzengruben. ;)
This is mainly due to a possible conflict of your passion for nonlinear dynamics being at odds with Friedman's rather linear view of probabilities, in the sense that they are an additive limit approaching Unity.
While my desire for reductionism really wants to believe it (the free market) is as simple as a summation of independent, random variables as Friedman espoused, I just think it all breaks down when you apply this model to an aggregate time series: in other words, it might work fine for analysis of a narrow-enough period, but buckles in the presence of the weight of the full dimension of time....
I'm not an SME, but I'm fairly certain it isn't that black and white. ;)
As far as I know, the more profitable adaptive models are heterogeneous. Specifically, they seem to be linear models with limited forecasting policies that are constantly updated with controlled real time noise. Friedman is merely a piece of a larger pie now.
I would highly (read: HIGHLY) recommend reading the works of Nassim Taleb, particularly Fooled By Randomness and, if you have the stomach to go further down the rabbit hole, Black Swan, for some painfully depressing yet well-written, very readable, thoughts on the subject. He touches heavily on social psychology, which really gets at the heart of the matter, I think. Put another (rather cynical) way, the concept of the global economy is really just one big confidence scam.
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll look into them. ;)
Not touching that one with a ten foot schnitzengruben. ;)
hmm, shouldn't that be schnitzengruEben?
I'm not an SME, but I'm fairly certain it isn't that black and white. ;)
just an armchair quant, eh? ;)
As far as I know, the more profitable adaptive models are heterogeneous. Specifically, they seem to be linear models with limited forecasting policies that are constantly updated with controlled real time noise. Friedman is merely a piece of a larger pie now.
Yeah, there's a ton of Monte Carlo-style trial-and-erroring going on as they grope for the one that seems to yield the best fit.
In my opinion, where Friedman's insistence on a normal distribution approaching Unity applies in the current state of "the real world" is when you view the aggregate of all the computational models in play. That's the actual normal distribution at work. The summation of all of them tends to converge on the same spot, which, in the case of our current situation, is a massively overinflated toxic asset soup. All of the models were making more-or-less correct decisions within their narrow timeslices. The inputs being introduced (perhaps even the 'noise' itself, not sure about how that is derived as I'm far from SME status as well!) are necessarily influenced by the outcomes of all of the other computational trading models in use out there. Essentially, with the explosion in popularity of the models, which very few people inside of the firms themselves understood (or cared to understand, based on the "money" they were all making), we witnessed a massive feedback loop as the various models (many of which are permitted to place trades *without* human review, for all the good that may (not) have done) all incrementally bumped each other up. At that point, one of the models started to go south, or got unplugged, etc. and the whole thing started to cave in!
Rather amusing to us fans of complex, interdependent systems, anyway.
hmm, shouldn't that be schnitzengruEben?
You know, v-bulletin code actually supports diacritics.
(Added emphasis on *bull* and *critic*.) ;)
just an armchair quant, eh? ;)
Not even that. Any macroeconomics I pick up is a byproduct of my philosophical studies. I know very little about it.
Yeah, there's a ton of Monte Carlo-style trial-and-erroring going on as they grope for the one that seems to yield the best fit.
They don't seem to be doing too badly. ;)
They don't seem to be doing too badly. ;)
Sure, they do wonderfully until it all goes very badly. The feedback loop self-perpetuates until it implodes.
I'd certainly be curious to hear about any automated trading system that withdrew via its own decision, and not because of a human overseer/operator putting the brakes on. Even then, however, there would still be an element of chance: i.e. the Monte Carlo simulation in question arrived at the decision that it was time to sell. There might be many like that, but from the standpoint that they tend to follow each other, the first one to arrive at that conclusion would be the especially interesting (correct) one.
John A Roark
12-03-2008, 12:05 PM
j/k, a little levity, no offense to the learned parties preceding.
Aristotle
Locke
Jefferson
Rand
Heinlein
The only truly original author there is Ari, but each of them said things in their own way that compels me.