Tom Tomorrow takes on Goldman Sachs
What valuable societal purpose is served by the efforts of Goldman Sachs? Watch them try to explain . . . Here's the tie-in.
More quotes
More quotes I've recently added to my growing collection ... Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) [I]f by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal." John F. Kennedy, 1960 “When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall meekly behind them. . . The mantra ‘the best we can get’ is a recipe for corruption. We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences.” Howard Zinn It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. Dean Acheson The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), Ecce Homo, Foreword [more . . . ]
Gilligan and his Island friends return home
Today my wife surprised the family by renting a DVD of Gilligan's Island episodes from Netflix. I hadn't seen any of these shows for decades--they originally ran from 1964-1967 on CBS. Not that I forgot that the show was goofy. How long did it take to write one of those episodes, 30 minutes? Yet watching two of the episodes tonight did remind me that Gilligan's Island strongly imprinted its images upon the young version of me, perhaps more strongly than anything I remember from back then (I was 8 years old when it originally ran). The characters looked exactly how I remembered them, and the plots were embarrassingly predictable, just how I remembered them as a child. I'd like to say that viewing these episodes served as some sort of time travel, but I simply can't. And the series continues to live on in syndication and DVD rentals, with new generations being exposed to it. Gilligan's Island is a world-class meme, a meme that allowed millions of people to put up their feet to have a bit of mindless fun once each week. And today I was reassured that Mary Ann was as gorgeous as I remembered her. Yes, I far preferred Mary Ann over Ginger. I always did, even as a pre-pubescent viewer. And I was not alone in my preference. On several occasions over the years, I have found myself in discussions where someone raises the concern that too many of today's children waste valuable time that they should be spending exposing themselves to more intellectually rigorous activities. Inevitably, some high-accomplished person in the room then reminds the rest of us about the huge number of hours that most of us spent watching Gilligan's Island when we were children, the original runs and the re-runs. Yet many of us turned out OK. Or at least that is the argument.
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.