Archive for June 4th, 2010
Knowledge and Focus
At Edge.com, Researcher David Dalrymple discusses the effect of the Internet on knowledge and focus:
Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.
The value of uncertainty
At Edge.com, John Brockman recently had a fascinating conversion with Emanuel Derman, who noted that “many physicists and other scientists . . . have flooded Wall Street in recent years.” Derman described their work as follows:
They are known as “quants” because they do quantitative finance. Seduced by a vision of mathematical elegance underlying some of the messiest of human activities, they apply skills they once hoped to use to untangle string theory or the nervous system to making money.
Derman then quoted particle physicist Heinz Pagels on the importance of maintaining uncertainty on Wall Street:
Mathematicians and others are endeavoring to apply insights gleaned from the sciences of complexity to the seemingly intractable problem of understanding the world economy. I have a guess, however, that if this problem can be solved (and that is unlikely in the near future), then it will not be possible to use this knowledge to make money on financial markets. One can make money only if there is real risk based on actual uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no risk.
This quote fuels my suspicions regarding the unnecessarily complex nature of modern financial instruments.
Lucky people
I had seen this before, but can’t help but watch it again. Quite a collection of incredible almost disasters.
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