Emanuel Derman

I recently ran into someone who I had always regarded as more or less compos mentis, but they told me quite seriously that the Rothschilds ran the world because they owned countries rather than corporations. Now, I’m not immune to the charms of conspiracy theories; some things in the world are so messed up that I can see how only a conspiracy could explain them. If a small cabal of invisible people ruled the world for their own profit and pleasure it very likely would turn out just the way it has, only probably a little more organized. Unless they are fiendishly clever and add the noise to make it look unplanned.

I think the real hidden conspiracy is the conspiracy of the A____’s and think they are to blame for screwing up the world, even if they are working in the service of the Rothschilds.

I refer to the Advertisers. I’m tired of anti-depressant ads. And I’m especially appalled at how advertising funds the fortunes of the giant internet companies, the manipulative G___’s and  F____’s.  I’ve grown to dislike advertising and the way it pays and affects so much. I particularly hate it for the fact that G___ and F____ make their money by delivering me to companies who pay for me to use it, which explains most of the bad things about G___ lately. Companies used to get paid for delivering eyeballs; now they get paid for delivering souls.

I wish people could pay their own money for what they want. There should be a law that prevents other people paying for your use of things if it compromises you, just like there’s a law against bribery. Maybe having entertainment that doesn’t violate you isn’t impossible — look at HBO and movies and books, still so far supported by paying customers.

I am sorry that a lot of Big Data (not all of it), a new and interesting field for quantitative people, is driven by pleasing advertisers too.

I thought of this again when I  read an article about Dwight Macdonald* in the latest NY Review of Books. (The article is behind the paywall — hooray. If you want to read it you have to subscribe or go to a library that subscribes.) The article quotes Macdonald in the 1950s:

If the US doesn’t or cannot change its mass culture…it will lose the war against [the] USSR. Americans have been made into permanent adolescents by advertising, mass culture—uncritical, herdminded, pleasure-loving, concerned about trivia of materialistic living, scared of death, sex, old age….

I’d like a world where you somehow have the ability to pay for what you consume directly.

* I don’t really know much about Dwight Macdonald. I once met his daughter who was a teacher in the ’80s at my son’s nursery school. But I do like these other quotes about him in the NY Review of Books article (my italics below):

Politics (Macdonald’s magazine published in the 1940s) differed from all other political magazines by treating politics as a branch of morals.

And:

Macdonald believed that an active subjective judgment was a more valid way to approach moral reality than any fixed, existing system, whether it based itself on allegedly scientific Marxist authority or on divine authority. And he believed that subjective judgment was required in order to achieve any real community: “I think each man’s values come from intuitions which are peculiar to himself and yet—if he is talented as a moralist—also strike common chords that vibrate respondingly in other people’s consciences. This is what ethical teachers have always done; it is the only way we have learned anything essential about ethics or communicated our discoveries to others….”

My carefully concealed always positive outlook on life is taking a beating these days, and the only pleasures are (i) attacking inconsistencies in other people’s positions and (ii) defending my own right to the same.

In that respect, the other day I received an email from my publisher, Simon and Schuster, exhorting me urgently to list not only Amazon on my website but Barnes and Noble too:

BN supports your book online and in stores and it’s crucial that they are represented.

Obviously, publishers are getting worried about competition from Amazon, who are now not only distributing other publishers’ book but also  publishing Amazon’s own. They should worry; Amazon is so efficient and publishers are still living in a cramped archaic world. If I ever wrote another book I would certainly consider publishing it through Amazon, which provides quick turnaround.

Nevertheless, Amazon is too powerful. It’s one thing to be a distributor of everyone else’s books; it’s totally another to also simultaneously be a publisher. Those two functions are best separated, via arguments similar to the ones that suggest that producing financial securities should perhaps be separated from market-making. Too much concentrated power over the entire market.

So, I was amenable to Simon and Schuster’s request to treat B&N on an equal footing with Amazon.

But then, I took a look at the page for my book on the B&N website, and there is minimal information there. In contrast, on Amazon, S&S has loaded the site with excerpts from any good reviews. If you want to buy a book, you get much more information (even excluding reader reviews) on Amazon.

I think I won’t do any work on this until they do.

I have been reading The Connectome: How The Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, by Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at MIT, and formerly a theoretical physicist.

One of his talks on the web is called “I am my connectome.” My own private connectome usually has a sort of uncontrollable synaptic response to statements like that, which seems to deny itself, but that would be quibbling with PR, and so, having functioned my whole life while knowing nothing at all about my insides, I have enjoyed the first 60 pages.

But one paragraph on pages 63-64 did throw me off:

If I could observe the activity of all your neurons, I would be able to decode what your are perceiving or thinking. This kind of mind reading would require knowing the “neural code,” which you can picture as a huge dictionary. Each entry of the dictionary lists a distinct perception and its corresponding pattern of neural activity. In principle, we could compile this dictionary by recording the activity patterns generate by a huge number of stimuli.

Now, just prior to reading this paragraph I had read Peter Woit’s latest blog post about the absence of signs of supersymmetry at the LHC in Switzerland.

And then my connectome wondered: is there a pattern in my connectome’s neurons that corresponds to my connectome’s discovery of the correct Theory of Everything?

Or can that pattern only be there after other people have found the right concepts?

Put another way, was there a neuronal pattern residing in Aristotle’s neuronal dictionary that corresponded to Newton’s Laws?

If so, then somewhere in my connectome is the answer to everything that can be known, even if the steps towards it and the concepts necessary have not been articulated yet.

Does a statement like that really mean anything at all?

I watched two recent finals — The Australian Tennis Open (Djokovic vs. Nadal) and the Super Bowl (Giants vs. Patriots) and their endings were very different in spirit. I liked the Super Bowl ending better, surprisingly for me.

Tennis is a non-contact sport,  and even today you can’t foul your opponent. But when Djokovic won a close very exciting game filled with reversals, he went literally ape — snarled, looked up at the sky, roared several times with bared teeth, tore off his shirt, flexed his muscles.

Intimidating to the other apes, though the game was already over.

I understand being happy about winning, and aggression is necessary to do so, but I dislike this kind of triumphalist gloating. Personally, Borg and the other Swedes were my stylistic heroes, plus Sampras and Federer. Still, no one gets hurt and it’s not violent.

The Super Bowl was diametrically opposite. The game was filled with aggression and violence in the cause of getting the ball into the end zone. But when someone got a touchdown they spiked the ball and did a dance of joy, not triumph. And when the Giants finally won, they didn’t roar, they didn’t trample, they didn’t gloat. They merely looked genuinely happy.

Strange that tennis brings out the worst at the end, and football the best.

PHOTOS: Novak Djokovic of Serbia celebrates after defeating Rafael Nadal of Spain in their men’s singles final match at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne January 30, 2012. REUTERS/Ryan Pierse/Pool. New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning raises the Vince Lombardi Trophy after defeating the New England Patriots to win the NFL Super Bowl XLVI football game in Indianapolis, Indiana, February 5, 2012. REUTERS/Matt Sullivan

Some interesting stuff I’m reading:

Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, has a chapter on The Metaphysics of Sexual Love, and remarks how strange it is that love ceaselessly occupies people’s thoughts, interests and readings, and yet has gone relatively unexamined from a philosophical point of view. He brands as naive Spinoza’s view that love is merely pleasure associated with an external object, and I’m inclined to agree. For Schopenhauer, it’s all about matter propagating itself, the temporary unity of lovers’ feeling reflecting the unity of the yet unborn child. Strong mutual attraction, he says, is related to the suitability of the characteristics of the future child from the point of view of the species, and has nothing to do with personal lifelong compatibility. Not a cheerful guy.

Money, the other topic of people’s relentless focus, is a mystery, too. Where does it come from and what is its real purpose and how much does an economy need? Forty economists were recently quoted as saying that a return to the gold standard is ridiculous, and that money ought to be controlled according to economic principles (though I don’t think the forty agree on what those are). Ben Bernanke has said gold is NOT a form of money, but was still at a loss to explain why central banks keep gold reserves, and could only invoke tradition.

So, I am just about to reread Fischer Black’s interesting paper Banking and Interest Rates in a World without Money.