economics

There are two basic principles on which economics is based, and they are both false.

1. People act in their own best self-interest.
In fact, that doesn't always happen - it's demonstrable that people don't do this. They have social, personal, emotional reasons to behave otherwise, not even considering that "best self-interest" is impossible to define in terms that individuals experience.

2. All other things being equal, two products with different value will sell for different prices.
In fact, all other things are never equal. We live in a very complex world.

Once we accept these basic limitations of economics, we can use it to understand many things about the world. But pretending like it IS reality (instead of an imperfect model of reality), is like going into McDonald's with several business partners you're trying to impress, intending to sit down to a delicious steak dinner on white tablecloths with a vintage wine, topped off with a world-class bananas foster and a nightcap of port.

archives

Are there any types of information which are not currently being collected and recorded?

Or is the question more about how to make information - which has already been abstracted out of reality - more accessible?

too big to fail

The big book I've just started, Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings, points out that errors and failures are a key part of our learning process. If we were to accomplish the "goal" of many theories and methods of stopping errors and failures, we would stop learning.
The assumption that the risk management techniques and other fancy features of the economy would stabilize it and moderate the business cycle was unrealistic. An assumption that any human-created system can operate without failure misunderstands the nature of human-created systems.
In fact, because we expect them to evolve, human systems must fail every so often.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13315818&source=hptextfeature

It's very interesting to think about the process of commercializing scientific research. I wonder how formalized the process is at MIT and other large research universities - maybe there's the potential for a research project there.

open source bank

the title on an article from wired.com today gave me the impression that someone was going to create a p2p bank - a financial trading/loan mechanism hosted and owned by thousands of loosely affiliated individuals, with no central control or ownership. Turns out that's not what the article was actually about, but wouldn't that be an awesome invention?

subintelligitur

I've been subscribing to Anu Garg's word of the day for a couple of years now, mostly for the quotes at the bottom of the email. But sometimes a new word jumps out at me, and its etymology suggests to me patterns in the evolution of our culture.

today's word of the day: subintelligitur. Meaning: something that is not made explicit, but is nonetheless understood.

The quote used to illustrate:
"We pray to God as a Person, as a larger self; but there must always be a subintelligitur that He is not a Person. Our forms of worship, public and private, imply some interference with the course of nature."
Benjamin Jowett; Life & Letters; 1886.

This reminds me of my many (mostly imagined) arguments with religious types about how god should not be anthropomorphised this way. And this reminds me of the dozens of other philosophical conversations railing against the representation of some cultural norm or value as a simple, well-contained entity (because they are in fact ambiguous, abstract, and evolving).

The reason for these conversations, and many others like them, is essentially to bring out into the open the underlying assumptions and understandings of our society, culture, and race. It is to make explicit those subintelligitur supports for our culture which buoy it up over the chaos of the animal world. It is to cut the earth and stone away from another, deeper level of the girders of social agreements that guide our collective behaviors.

Once we free the structure of our society from the darkness of the unconscious, it is no longer held static by our genetic predispositions which evolve at a glacial pace. Once we can see and analyze the assumptions and preconceptions which define our culture, we can begin to fix them where they are broken or where technology has shifted our needs away from our evolved social tools. Or we can take the pieces and build something altogether new.

David Foster Wallace as visionary

Reading in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace today was kind of surreal. The story reminds me of myself on many levels, but I was surprised to feel that I would have had a lot more empathy with him a year or two ago. I was also chasing my impossible dreams of capturing or expressing something I knew and felt: the epiphany of infinity that swallowed me while I was contemplating the nature of abstraction in that cold, lonely cabin in the Arkansas foothills. I formulated it on paper once or twice, but I've never really shown it to anyone except Dad. I accept that nobody will understand or care until I can find a use for it.

None the less, the discussion of boredom - emptiness - that he was trying to capture resonates deeply. The few clips from his writing struck a chord inside me and reminded me of the joy of capturing little insights and feelings through words. But I think there is something in the story even deeper about the drive to envision something and then transform it into a representation in reality. Much like the design process, the author goes through a learning process where he writes, reflects on that, and lets the limitations of what is possible reflect onto the envisioned goal.

The stronger the will of the writer or the designer, the more he or she will stick to that original vision regardless that what is created is but a shallow shade of the abstraction. And doubtless DFW was a strong one, but perhaps he could not live with the inherent limitations of reality; perhaps he could not accept that some visions cannot be fully captured, represented, and communicated.

I am a weaker sort of creator - I will throw myself into a vision for a little while, but after that first pass is done I realize that I'm burning myself up to go back to it, to try it again. Once I've got it to a first level of approximation, I move on to the next project and the next vision. Grad school has taught me to hold on a little longer, to let my goal evolve and change in response to what I can create, and to then try again to bring the goal into being.

But looking at the design process through this lens, another of ID's great focuses comes into focus: the commonly-held original vision. When a group of four or five designers collectively hammer out an instantiation of an idea, none of them can hold back, none of them can say of the entire project "this isn't what I wanted" unless he's going to give up on the group. The project inexorably moves forward, with each team member merely adding to an existing object, none fully responsible for the original idea, and none able to fully negate the value within.

presenting

I've been unsure the last couple of days about my end-of-quarter presentations. I don't have that sharp, clear feeling that we have achieved the level of simplicity and deep insight that I normally associate with success. Yet it seems that my professors and colleagues are satisfied - even impressed - with the quality of my teams' work.
Several understandings of this situation present themselves:
1. There's an opportunity area for adding what I see as a missing level of insight and depth on top of the workaday strengths of ID methods or, more generally, on top of simply copying what others are doing in any given field.
2. I am having a fair degree of success actually achieving that, and should be careful to gently push myself to greater facility and clarity over the coming decades, rather than becoming angry and disillusioned that my dreams are not realized now.
3. They are just being nice, and if I don't gear up and really focus soon I'll end up at the bottom of my class.
4. There are other measures of success that everyone else is aiming for - I should seek out and better understand these other value systems in order to better communicate.

In general, I have a lot of extra energy with which to push myself which is not finding its way into my schoolwork. The deeper question is: to what extent can I meet my professional goals while still taking time to pursue art, philosophy, and girls?