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Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the def

by cjfd 7y ago

Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the definition of a fractal. Seems like an ideologically motivated piece to badmouth markets which is popular. And if one is from the other side of the spectrum one would say that in many instances these big companies get incentivized by government regulation. On both sides there is too much of a knee-jerk reaction and too less appreciation that things vary greatly per sector and per case and in some cases one side of the opinion spectrum is correct and in other cases the other side.

paraschopra 7y ago
My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions (price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that. I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived experience.
- ajuc 7y ago
  > price, packaging, utility these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well. I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".
  - paraschopra 7y ago
    The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years of our evolution) If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry would have eliminated unhappiness. Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.
    - ajuc 7y ago
      Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster. Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative differences, just a difference in degree. And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years. What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple. We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few simple rules of how they interact. > Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence. Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the result so why do it. > In that process, richness is lost. What do you exactly mean by that?
    - clairity 7y ago
      that’s stereotyping (in my own personal lingo): imperfect models that help us cope with certain aspects of life while being detrimental/ignorant of others. our whole brains have evolved to handle the chaotic (fractal) world we inhabit, but our conscious brains must reduce that to something rational (limited to following logical rules) so as to be actionable. you seem to see that as a bad thing. buddha would suggest that that’s just the way it is, so it’s best to accept it.
- koliber 7y ago
  I loved the post! I would rephrase the catchphrase: Life is fractal, but metrics are square
- gdubs 7y ago
  I guess the question is how many variables do you need to see chaotic behavior? I’m thinking of a Lorenz attractor where a few simple rules produce wildly chaotic outcomes. We experience daily life many levels of abstraction up from what are (arguably) very simple atomic interactions. We could be looking at markets at this low-level, but at some higher level there’s an emergent phenomena happening that we’re largely unaware of — or incapable of fully comprehending. /deep-thoughts

by cjfd 7y ago

paraschopra 7y ago

My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions (price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that. I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived experience.

ajuc 7y ago
> price, packaging, utility these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well. I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".
- paraschopra 7y ago
  The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years of our evolution) If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry would have eliminated unhappiness. Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.
  - ajuc 7y ago
    Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster. Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative differences, just a difference in degree. And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years. What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple. We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few simple rules of how they interact. > Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence. Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the result so why do it. > In that process, richness is lost. What do you exactly mean by that?
  - clairity 7y ago
    that’s stereotyping (in my own personal lingo): imperfect models that help us cope with certain aspects of life while being detrimental/ignorant of others. our whole brains have evolved to handle the chaotic (fractal) world we inhabit, but our conscious brains must reduce that to something rational (limited to following logical rules) so as to be actionable. you seem to see that as a bad thing. buddha would suggest that that’s just the way it is, so it’s best to accept it.
koliber 7y ago
I loved the post! I would rephrase the catchphrase: Life is fractal, but metrics are square
gdubs 7y ago
I guess the question is how many variables do you need to see chaotic behavior? I’m thinking of a Lorenz attractor where a few simple rules produce wildly chaotic outcomes. We experience daily life many levels of abstraction up from what are (arguably) very simple atomic interactions. We could be looking at markets at this low-level, but at some higher level there’s an emergent phenomena happening that we’re largely unaware of — or incapable of fully comprehending. /deep-thoughts