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Out of curiosity, why would you consider such a thing a philosophy as opposed to something that can be demonstrated, or challenged, with evidence? For instance
by rjf72 8y ago
Out of curiosity, why would you consider such a thing a philosophy as opposed to something that can be demonstrated, or challenged, with evidence?
For instance the stock market is an example of a complex system that ought be trivial to create a very strong deterministic model of. Though it qualifies as complex, in reality it's quite a trivial system. Things tend to go up on good news, down on bad news, and all actors involved have mostly the same very simple motivation of increasing their returns. Real complex systems in practice are exponentially more difficult than the stock market because motivations and quantifications are far less clear. Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless.
I'm sure your logic is to suggest that we yet lack the means of deciphering even such simple systems. Yet you are also making one extremely strong implicit statement. Systems with sufficient entropy become impossible to 'decode' to any meaningful degree. Consequently, you're arguing that there is a limited amount of entropy in complex social systems. Where is the logic for declaring this a reasonable view? I am not saying this to antagonize. The reason I'm curious is I imagine your view is quite common, yet I've never once heard it plainly stated (and I imagine most who hold such views aren't even aware they hold them). And now it's quite sparked my curiosity!
- barry-cotter 8y ago> Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless. It is precisely because of the effort to predict and exploit the stock market that predicting it is so difficult. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-are-anti-inductive https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar... Markets Are Anti-Inductive Let's say you see me flipping a coin. It is not necessarily a fair coin. It's a biased coin, and you don't know the bias. I flip the coin nine times, and the coin comes up "heads" each time. I flip the coin a tenth time. What is the probability that it comes up heads? If you answered "ten-elevenths, by Laplace's Rule of Succession", you are a fine scientist in ordinary environments, but you will lose money in finance. In finance the correct reply is, "Well... if everyone else also saw the coin coming up heads... then by now the odds are probably back to fifty-fifty." Recently on Hacker News I saw a commenter insisting that stock prices had nowhere to go but down, because the economy was in such awful shape. If stock prices have nowhere to go but down, and everyone knows it, then trades won't clear - remember, for every seller there must be a buyer - until prices have gone down far enough that there is once again a possibility of prices going up.