I have been rereading (and enjoying, for the third time in my life) the book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori.
Comments closedCategory: Uncategorized
I think I’ve maybe been a closet phenomenologist for the last 30 years, only I didn’t know it.
Comments closedI’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.
Comments closedMy 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.
Comments closedI 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.
Comments closedI 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.
Comments closedSchopenhauer, 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.
Comments closedSomething about naive liberal humanitarianism often bugs and irritates me more than correspondingly naive reactionary beliefs, and I (probably wrongly) end up judging more severely than I should otherwise good people who espouse it naively.
Comments closedWe’ve been in a bull market for Treasury Bonds since the late 1970s, and, as a student pointed out to me recently, and I think I can confirm, we’ve been in a bull market for academic grades too.
Comments closedThe Fed’s blithe confidence in their models and forecasts influenced society’s behavior. Therefore, not only were their models wrong, but their unacknowledged wrongness arguably made things worse.
Comments closedThere are two very different uses of the word probability.
Comments closedIn quantum mechanics — i.e. in the real world as we understand it today — matter can have two kinds of formerly apparently contradictory qualities. The same applies to people.
Comments closedLately it has become fashionable to disparage intuition in favor of careful statistical analysis. Me, I’m still a fan of intuition.
Comments closedIn Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Macau, the thing that has impressed itself on me through airports and downtowns is the bombardment of luxury advertising.
Comments closedPart of the reason economists and traders are likely to be fooled is because, underlying everything they do is the statistics of what is ultimately human behavior.
Comments closedSelf-schooled in finance and unschooled in economics, I was very glad to be sent a link to Hayek’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture.
Comments closed“Lola” is executed with great panache, and loosely relevant to economic affairs today. It’s set in a small town in the boom of 1950s West Germany, and is about contagion, the moral kind.
Comments closedI am thoroughly tired of Europe, America, Obama, the Republicans, banks central and peripheral, and everyone’s indignation about the above. And of my own indignation too. It’s affecting my quality of life.
Comments closed1. Everyone is a grownup and no one is more grown up than anyone else.
Comments closedSam Shepard as technocratic cold America vs. Julie Delpy as cultured sophisticated Europe.
Comments closedEveryone avers that honesty, ethics, morality, art, literature, science, etc. are good, but if you look at the way people behave most of the time, their actions give the lie to their beliefs.
Comments closedTwo movies this week, one new — “Margin Call” — and one old a second time — Alan Pakula’s “Klute.” Both didn’t live up to what I expected or recalled.
Comments closedThough Kahneman and I both sometimes use the word intuition, we are talking about different qualities.
Comments closedSomeone directed me to this remark by Larry Page: “DNA is about 600 megabytes compressed making it smaller than any modern operating system like Linux or Windows.”
Comments closedI have the luxury of not being a regulator, which I think is a very difficult job. I used to be a physicist, and Nature doesn’t care about regulations; she cares about principles.
Comments closedAt Times Square on the evening of Oct 15th it felt as though tidal forces were beginning to pull people apart.
Comments closedThis is an extended version of a review I wrote on Amazon for Lucky Bruce: A Memoir.
Comments closedWhy shouldn’t one regard all mental phenomena as meaningful? Why only some?
Comments closed