Rationality of markets my ass. From what I can see, the stock market is very loosely based on reality and ration decisions based on all available information. Mostly short term trends are dictated by the whim of a few large market movers and the self-fulfilling prophecies of their economic models.
Here's the thing: all of classical economics is based on the assumption that agents in an economic system are rational, meaning they make logical decisions based on all available data. There are two problems with this model. First, people aren't rational. If you don't believe this, look at the shit people buy on ebay. Large groups of people behave slightly more rationally, but they are still prone to herd mentality, and they're not completely rational besides. Bucking the conventional wisdom has a higher cost than making "irrational" decisions. Yes, there have been studies to this effect. And while "more" rational is in some sense better, it nonetheless fucks up game theoretic models nicely. Being just slightly willing to dick over someone else at the expense of your own payoff can completely change the outcome of a game (think about almost any game of Monopoly you've ever played...assuming you've ever actually finished a game). Also, some people (and even groups of people) are just plain stupid. For example, think about the game of rock, paper, scissors. It is very easy to see that the optimal "rational" strategy for this game is to pick your choice completely randomly with equal probability for each choice. This is provably so assuming rational opponents. However, when a tournament of computer programs was held, the winner was not a bot that used the random strategy. The strategy it used is a bit more complicated than I'd like to go into here, but basically it calculated the top few most likely strategies an opponent might take to try to game the system and generated counter-moves for them. Such a strategy is provably sub-optimal, but it's nonetheless brilliant. And it won the tournament. The optimal strategy wasn't optimal.
The other problem is the whole "all available information" requirement. There are always unknowns. In any real problem, there are always factors of the system that aren't known, or at the very least it is prohibitively expensive (in terms of money, time, people, etc.) to find out. It is, in fact, a stated desirable quality at many companies to be able to make quick decisions based on incomplete information. Bullshitting is coveted. Moreover, people evolved to be good at that kind of thing! The human brain is generally better than computers at games because it can make educated guesses based on context that a computer simply can't. So why is it surprising, then, that in any economic system the agents will take actions based on intuition that cannot be justified given the amount of information in their possession? Acting on intuition is what people do! Any macroscopic model of human behavior is useless if it does not incorporate this tendency into its model!
Oh, and then there's always the issue that anything you might want to study in economics is too terminally tangled in inter-dependencies that trying to isolate variables is a laughably doomed endeavor. Any statistical study of an economic system will likely say more about the presenter's ability to manipulate a set of numbers to show what he or she wants to than about the actual subject at hand, as far as I'm concerned.
Can you tell economists annoy me?
I've been wondering lately if it's possible to derive a model based on irrational and/or stupid and/or herd-following agents. Perhaps such a model could incorporate the fact that said agents use a rational agent model. Seems to me it should be possible to construct such a thing and game the system. I've heard there is an emerging field of economics called "behavioral economics," but I don't know much about it. I believe it deals with some of these issues, but I'm not sure. And I'm too lazy and too tired to google it.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Political rants aside...
Let's get back to my basic fatalism. All this giving a shit about stuff wears me out. It's nice to be reminded that really, people are dumb and deserve what their elected leaders do to them. Yay democracy!
Sunday, January 30, 2005
The voting farce
GW really doesn't have a handle on numbers. First he called the slimmest plurality for a re-election in recent memory a "resounding mandate" to go ahead with his deluded agenda. Now he's quick to call the Iraqi elections an "overwhelming success." As usual he's full of shit.
Fact A: Government targets for a voting "success" were 50% turnout. For a country that is having their first democratic elections in decades, I don't know that that can really be called a "success".
Fact B: As expected, it's all Shi'ite voters. Half-way democratic elections is like being half pregnant: it just doesn't work. It's an all or nothing thing. If you have an election where the minority party doesn't vote, that's not really an election, now is it? It's more of an excuse for the majority party to take power. And that kind of situation doesn't so much lead to peaceful coexistence as it does to...what's the word I'm looking for?...civil war. Incidentally, the estimated turnout right now is at about 60%. Care to guess what percentage of the population the Shi'ites are? (I'll give you a hint: it's 60%).
Fact A: Government targets for a voting "success" were 50% turnout. For a country that is having their first democratic elections in decades, I don't know that that can really be called a "success".
Fact B: As expected, it's all Shi'ite voters. Half-way democratic elections is like being half pregnant: it just doesn't work. It's an all or nothing thing. If you have an election where the minority party doesn't vote, that's not really an election, now is it? It's more of an excuse for the majority party to take power. And that kind of situation doesn't so much lead to peaceful coexistence as it does to...what's the word I'm looking for?...civil war. Incidentally, the estimated turnout right now is at about 60%. Care to guess what percentage of the population the Shi'ites are? (I'll give you a hint: it's 60%).
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Monkey Porn!
"Did you see that fine-ass monkey? Daaaaaaamn! I'd give up my juice for a piece of that..."
Friday, January 28, 2005
Thursday, January 27, 2005
The cause of the culture wars
I never realized the true motivating force behind the "red" states and "blue" states schism. Damn Swedes!
(isn't confusing correlation and cause fun, boys and girls?)
(isn't confusing correlation and cause fun, boys and girls?)
Monday, January 24, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Darwin lives!
This is arguably the simplest and most profound vindication of natural selection in history.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Monday, January 17, 2005
Ever aspired to be more like a lawn sprinkler?
I just received the following spam. Is this honestly something somebody would pay for?
-----
From: bob@seachange.com
To: rivenmist137 at yahoo.com
Subject: Watch where you aim, cumshots pills!
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:35:48 -0500
Heya!
Has your cum ever dribbled and you wish it had shot out?
Have you ever wanted to impress your girl with a huge cumshot?
[link removed]
SPUR-M is the only site to offer an all natural male enhancement
formula that is proven to increase your sperm volume by up to 500%.
Our highly potent, volume enhancing formula will give our results
in days and comes with an impressive 100% guarantee.
[link removed]
Imagine the difference (look and feel) between dribbling your cum
compared to shooting out burst after burst. Try SPUR-M now! and
with our money back guarantee you have absolutely nothing to lose!
-----
From: bob@seachange.com
To: rivenmist137 at yahoo.com
Subject: Watch where you aim, cumshots pills!
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 08:35:48 -0500
Heya!
Has your cum ever dribbled and you wish it had shot out?
Have you ever wanted to impress your girl with a huge cumshot?
[link removed]
SPUR-M is the only site to offer an all natural male enhancement
formula that is proven to increase your sperm volume by up to 500%.
Our highly potent, volume enhancing formula will give our results
in days and comes with an impressive 100% guarantee.
[link removed]
Imagine the difference (look and feel) between dribbling your cum
compared to shooting out burst after burst. Try SPUR-M now! and
with our money back guarantee you have absolutely nothing to lose!
What a dick
More on Bush leg-humping Conspicious Consumption.
Did he seriously just suggest that having $40 million worth of festivities for his rich donors would do more to "celebrate the troops" than giving $300 bonuses to each soldier? Really? He really just said that? And there are people who voted for this man? I'm guessing...and this is just me talking here...I'm guessing that the troops would prefer the $300 to the warm and fuzzy feeling they get knowing a bunch of yuppie fucktards are dancing their not-shot-at asses off at some ball.
Did he seriously just suggest that having $40 million worth of festivities for his rich donors would do more to "celebrate the troops" than giving $300 bonuses to each soldier? Really? He really just said that? And there are people who voted for this man? I'm guessing...and this is just me talking here...I'm guessing that the troops would prefer the $300 to the warm and fuzzy feeling they get knowing a bunch of yuppie fucktards are dancing their not-shot-at asses off at some ball.
You may think you have seen big planes before...
...but you're wrong. First class has a duty-free store and lounge. A goddamn flying lounge!
Saturday, January 15, 2005
She even looks stupid.
Sure, it's reasonable to spend more than 1/10th our total aid for tsunami relief on a fucking ball. Also keep in mind that the ball costs more than our initial pledge for tsunami relief.
God bless America.
God bless America.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Bored
In the words of Garfield, "I'm bored. Bored bored bored. Bored bored bored bored bored bored..."
I have no idea what this post is going to be about. Could be anything. Could be how sick I am of being sick. My head is just a container for mucous, as far as I can tell. And a bad one at that. I keep on leaking.
It's 3 am. It's moments like these when I can kind of see the whole "technology is dangerous" argument. Normally, I think hippie luddite-types are full of shit. And objectively they are. It's like calling a hammer "evil." A hammer isn't evil. A hammer is just a hammer. It knows not whether it has been used to build a house for orphans or beat a puppy senseless. "Good" and "evil" are attributes of moral agents, and last time I checked, most of the hammers I have ever had the fortune to have met were distinctly lacking in free will. Frankly, I'd like to find one that did have free will because then I could convince it to build me shit. Man, that would be sweet. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah. Technology. Technology is just a tool (not a toll as I first typed...that's just dumb). To paraphrase George Carlin, it's the sick fuck that uses it that determines whether it's good or evil. But as I said, sitting here in the dark at 3 am half under the covers, questionably coherent from virus and sleepiness, I can see how one might argue techology is evil. If I didn't have this laptop, and if blogging tools had never been invented, I would have no means by which to cause non-renewable fossil fuels to be burned in some far away power plant just so I can babble incoherently. And trust me: it is not in society's interest for my thoughts to be easily or permanently recorded. Ask anyone who has ever known, dated, or slept with me. Note that those are 3 distinct sets.
Because I will probably forget if I don't note it here, let me take a moment to express my fiery loathing for people who bring babies and young, tantrum-prone children on airplanes, particularly overnight flights. Well, the people and the babies too. Just because they're babies doesn't mean they escape blame. I'm with the Catholics on that whole original sin thing. Those fuckers were guilty the moment they deformed, mutilated, and ultimately popped out of what should normally be one of the most wonderful places on earth. (Interestingly, did you know that original sin was invented by the church because they couldn't figure out any other reasonable explanation for why babies needed to be baptized? True story. Kinda makes sense too...how much can a small mushy being whose head hasn't fully formed yet and who isn't capable of much other than drooling, crapping, feeding, crying, and occasionally coughing things up be guilty of? Hmm...actually, I may have just answered my own question. After all, shitting in your pants and making someone else clean it up really should qualify as a sin.)
Yeah, so anyway...horrible things should be done to parents who bring young children on overnight flights. I mean, just don't. Don't! There are other flights. Small children can't sleep through the night, especially on a plane. I am not a parent (to my knowledge) and I know this. I mean, do you understand that this is a profound imposition on me? You don't have a god-given right to inflict your spawn on me. I am not impressed with you that you successfully fucked someone. Pretty much any fucktard can do that. You are not a hero because the only way you could figure out to put meaning in your life was to create another being that was wholly dependent on you. If this were the wild, I would be fully within my rights to create a baby-be-que out of your beloved little one as the propagation of your genes would be a threat to my own. Granted, if this were the wild, we probably wouldn't be riding on an A320 and watching some abomination of film with High Grant on a fuzzy television. But damnit, my point stands.
(and no, I don't know where this anger comes from. Actually, I do: it's from all the times when I was really, really tired and had to surpress the urge to strangle an infant. If Republicans can claim to be the party of "values" and then turn around and loosen Congressional ethics rules, I think I should be able to find enough moral ambiguity to neatly fit a strangled baby. I think that's only fair.)
Anyway, like I said...rambling. Bored. Tired. Should probably quit before I threaten a member of the clergy or something. Who needs alcohol when you have a deep, insatiable inner rage at humanity you can tap just as easily? :)
I have no idea what this post is going to be about. Could be anything. Could be how sick I am of being sick. My head is just a container for mucous, as far as I can tell. And a bad one at that. I keep on leaking.
It's 3 am. It's moments like these when I can kind of see the whole "technology is dangerous" argument. Normally, I think hippie luddite-types are full of shit. And objectively they are. It's like calling a hammer "evil." A hammer isn't evil. A hammer is just a hammer. It knows not whether it has been used to build a house for orphans or beat a puppy senseless. "Good" and "evil" are attributes of moral agents, and last time I checked, most of the hammers I have ever had the fortune to have met were distinctly lacking in free will. Frankly, I'd like to find one that did have free will because then I could convince it to build me shit. Man, that would be sweet. What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah. Technology. Technology is just a tool (not a toll as I first typed...that's just dumb). To paraphrase George Carlin, it's the sick fuck that uses it that determines whether it's good or evil. But as I said, sitting here in the dark at 3 am half under the covers, questionably coherent from virus and sleepiness, I can see how one might argue techology is evil. If I didn't have this laptop, and if blogging tools had never been invented, I would have no means by which to cause non-renewable fossil fuels to be burned in some far away power plant just so I can babble incoherently. And trust me: it is not in society's interest for my thoughts to be easily or permanently recorded. Ask anyone who has ever known, dated, or slept with me. Note that those are 3 distinct sets.
Because I will probably forget if I don't note it here, let me take a moment to express my fiery loathing for people who bring babies and young, tantrum-prone children on airplanes, particularly overnight flights. Well, the people and the babies too. Just because they're babies doesn't mean they escape blame. I'm with the Catholics on that whole original sin thing. Those fuckers were guilty the moment they deformed, mutilated, and ultimately popped out of what should normally be one of the most wonderful places on earth. (Interestingly, did you know that original sin was invented by the church because they couldn't figure out any other reasonable explanation for why babies needed to be baptized? True story. Kinda makes sense too...how much can a small mushy being whose head hasn't fully formed yet and who isn't capable of much other than drooling, crapping, feeding, crying, and occasionally coughing things up be guilty of? Hmm...actually, I may have just answered my own question. After all, shitting in your pants and making someone else clean it up really should qualify as a sin.)
Yeah, so anyway...horrible things should be done to parents who bring young children on overnight flights. I mean, just don't. Don't! There are other flights. Small children can't sleep through the night, especially on a plane. I am not a parent (to my knowledge) and I know this. I mean, do you understand that this is a profound imposition on me? You don't have a god-given right to inflict your spawn on me. I am not impressed with you that you successfully fucked someone. Pretty much any fucktard can do that. You are not a hero because the only way you could figure out to put meaning in your life was to create another being that was wholly dependent on you. If this were the wild, I would be fully within my rights to create a baby-be-que out of your beloved little one as the propagation of your genes would be a threat to my own. Granted, if this were the wild, we probably wouldn't be riding on an A320 and watching some abomination of film with High Grant on a fuzzy television. But damnit, my point stands.
(and no, I don't know where this anger comes from. Actually, I do: it's from all the times when I was really, really tired and had to surpress the urge to strangle an infant. If Republicans can claim to be the party of "values" and then turn around and loosen Congressional ethics rules, I think I should be able to find enough moral ambiguity to neatly fit a strangled baby. I think that's only fair.)
Anyway, like I said...rambling. Bored. Tired. Should probably quit before I threaten a member of the clergy or something. Who needs alcohol when you have a deep, insatiable inner rage at humanity you can tap just as easily? :)
Monday, January 10, 2005
Patents for all!
I'm sure the Linux community will go nuts over IBM's move to give away 500 patents. I'm sure it will be hailed by the more dim elements of the technology community as corporate vindication of copyleft, a harbinger of a new era in IP reform, and a benevolent move by sweet, innocent, saintly IBM in the face of evil IP hoarders like Microsoft. In reality, of course, IBM has decided that it can make its money through IT consulting services, which means it's in its own interest to promote free software (which it can then turn around and wrap in service contracts). So basically, it will have convinced a bunch of idealistic software developers to make a complementary product for them that they are free to distribute, thereby enabling their own business model. It's a parasitic relationship between IT/consulting and the software industry. And yes, Virginia, parasites are actually bad. All you do when you make software free is shift who gets the money and how.
Don't get me wrong. I think the IP system is completely broken, and I don't think open source is a bad thing per se (though again I reiterate that it's more important that the interfaces be open than the source itself...there is a difference). It's just that the system itself needs to be fixed. Until that happens, refusing to place intellectual property under the proper protections just enables someone other than the developer to make money off it. As a developer, that pisses me off.
Don't get me wrong. I think the IP system is completely broken, and I don't think open source is a bad thing per se (though again I reiterate that it's more important that the interfaces be open than the source itself...there is a difference). It's just that the system itself needs to be fixed. Until that happens, refusing to place intellectual property under the proper protections just enables someone other than the developer to make money off it. As a developer, that pisses me off.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Once again, fatalism is the only anesthetic against reality...
I gotta stop reading things like this...
Thursday, January 06, 2005
The only cure for cognitive dissonance is fatalism these days...
I was about to make a snide comment about this little gem, but it seems I have been beaten to the punch. The only faint, fatalistic solace I cling to is that nothing ever changes unless a critical mass of people are miserable. I just hope I don't get too fucked up in the revolution.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Sometimes the left is as poorly thought out as the right...
It struck me when reading this interview with Richard Stallman that he sounds, at the risk of being flamed, frighteningly like GW Bush sometimes. Both men talk about "freedom" in an utterly abstract and totally useless sense. Bush says the terrorists hate freedom (either meaningless or not true, depending how you interpret it), and Stallman says that "non-free" software deprives people of freedom (also meaningless or not true depending on interpretation).
In what I've read about and by Stallman, I've never been impressed with him. His arguments are simplistic in a way that increasingly reminds me of GW Bush. He makes unsubstantiated arguments based purely on belief. People are not free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, nor should they be. I can't blow up somebody just because he pisses me off, much as I might want to. Nor do I have the freedom to access every piece of everything I own. I can't break open my car's dashboard and roll back the odometer, for instance. If I, or more relevently anyone, could do that, it would undermine the legitimacy of car sales. People understand that. There have never been protests about one's ability to change one's odometer arbitrarily. They understand it's in their best interest to be able to rely on an odometer's readout. And yet, that's a machine I own that I'm not allowed to change the internals of by law, and that's a good thing. It's also a very simple counter-argument to "free software" that none of Stallman's rhetoric has ever addressed.
I just want him to frame his argument for me at the very least. He speaks in slogans. Tell me what goal you're trying to achieve in concrete terms, and then explain to me why only "free software" achieves that goal. Saying it "inhibits freedom" is meaningless and annoying. There are arguments to be made for open source. Personally, my over-simplified opinion is that it ultimately doesn't matter whether the source is open or not. It's the interfaces that matter. So long as the interfaces are open, there's room for competition since different components will be interchangable. It's the lack of competition that you want to primarily be concerned with, at least in this case.
Stallman's arguments just always strike me as inane and poorly-thought out. He does a disservice to the open source philosophy. He promotes freedom as an unquestionable absolute the same way Bush does, and it's quite simply not an absolute. Life is full of tradeoffs, and there are things that are worth trading little wedges of freedom for. Trading my freedom to drop an anvil on someone gains me the safety of knowing I won't, in turn, have one dropped on my head. Putting money into a 401k and trading the ability to get to it now gains me a higher return on it and more money for when I retire. And when talking about software, trading the ability to tweak my system potentially gains me a variety of things including a company's ability to easily patch, configure, update, etc. a component I bought from them. What if Tivo had to try to roll out a new service for its boxes if everyone ran their own version of the Tivo software? It would be a nightmare, and it wouldn't work. Giving up your freedom to tweak your Tivo gains you the ability to have your Tivo be updated remotely and easily, which in turns means having the damn thing just work.
Anyway. I digress. I'm ranting in a semi-coherent manner. I just hate it when people assert nebulous, unsubstantiated opinions as arguments. It's like trying to argue with a 4-year-old whose only justification for anything is, "'cuz!"
In what I've read about and by Stallman, I've never been impressed with him. His arguments are simplistic in a way that increasingly reminds me of GW Bush. He makes unsubstantiated arguments based purely on belief. People are not free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, nor should they be. I can't blow up somebody just because he pisses me off, much as I might want to. Nor do I have the freedom to access every piece of everything I own. I can't break open my car's dashboard and roll back the odometer, for instance. If I, or more relevently anyone, could do that, it would undermine the legitimacy of car sales. People understand that. There have never been protests about one's ability to change one's odometer arbitrarily. They understand it's in their best interest to be able to rely on an odometer's readout. And yet, that's a machine I own that I'm not allowed to change the internals of by law, and that's a good thing. It's also a very simple counter-argument to "free software" that none of Stallman's rhetoric has ever addressed.
I just want him to frame his argument for me at the very least. He speaks in slogans. Tell me what goal you're trying to achieve in concrete terms, and then explain to me why only "free software" achieves that goal. Saying it "inhibits freedom" is meaningless and annoying. There are arguments to be made for open source. Personally, my over-simplified opinion is that it ultimately doesn't matter whether the source is open or not. It's the interfaces that matter. So long as the interfaces are open, there's room for competition since different components will be interchangable. It's the lack of competition that you want to primarily be concerned with, at least in this case.
Stallman's arguments just always strike me as inane and poorly-thought out. He does a disservice to the open source philosophy. He promotes freedom as an unquestionable absolute the same way Bush does, and it's quite simply not an absolute. Life is full of tradeoffs, and there are things that are worth trading little wedges of freedom for. Trading my freedom to drop an anvil on someone gains me the safety of knowing I won't, in turn, have one dropped on my head. Putting money into a 401k and trading the ability to get to it now gains me a higher return on it and more money for when I retire. And when talking about software, trading the ability to tweak my system potentially gains me a variety of things including a company's ability to easily patch, configure, update, etc. a component I bought from them. What if Tivo had to try to roll out a new service for its boxes if everyone ran their own version of the Tivo software? It would be a nightmare, and it wouldn't work. Giving up your freedom to tweak your Tivo gains you the ability to have your Tivo be updated remotely and easily, which in turns means having the damn thing just work.
Anyway. I digress. I'm ranting in a semi-coherent manner. I just hate it when people assert nebulous, unsubstantiated opinions as arguments. It's like trying to argue with a 4-year-old whose only justification for anything is, "'cuz!"
Saturday, January 01, 2005
Seriously...
Why does anyone vote Republican? Certain people just don't give a shit about the common good, and in a way I kind of respect that. But to vote Republican and think you're making the world a better place is to be so profoundly out of touch with reality that one begins to question whether Republican voters grasp even the most basic physical laws. Do these people know, for instance, that kittens can't fly or that doors must be opened before passing through them?
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