Category: writing
On a long trip from HK to JFK I reread The Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon. I read it as a desperate attempt to…
Comments closedI am going to teach an introductory course in financial engineering, and I hate the way people who introduce the subject in continuous time struggle…
Comments closedTo teach someone well, you have to be able to put yourself in that person’s mental place, because they are not you and don’t have…
Comments closedAn early outtake from my book Models.Behaving.Badly. An attempt to explain the principles of neoclassical finance from a rational point of view, and to point…
Comments closedLate in life, when his roots should have held him steady, he became unmoored, and it seemed inappropriate. But who determined what was appropriate?
Comments closedI find myself increasingly in irritated disagreement with the many neuroscientists and evangelically professional atheists who think that science is everything, that matter is all we have, and that photographic images of chemicals glowing in the brain are equivalent to thoughts and feelings. (I have no problem with their simply disbelieving in God.)
Comments closedWhy it?s not funny anymore?
Comments closedThe good days are here once again for models of the physical world: after a drought of almost fifty years, physicists at CERN have discovered what seems to be the long-awaited Higgs boson
Comments closedWhen the era of rationality finally dawned, it became clear to everyone that love doesn?t last.
Comments closedThe other day while teaching I suddenly briefly felt really ill with a pain in my lower back and then broke out in a copious cold sweat over every part of me; even the hair on my head was as wet as though I’d had a five mile run.
Comments closedI have been rereading (and enjoying, for the third time in my life) the book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori.
Comments closedI think I’ve maybe been a closet phenomenologist for the last 30 years, only I didn’t know it.
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 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 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 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 closedWhat follows are some remarks I intend to make on Friday Oct 21 2011 at a panel on global risk organized by GARP and the Federal…
Comments closedWhy shouldn’t one regard all mental phenomena as meaningful? Why only some?
Comments closedA video featuring Derman discussing his new book.
Comments closedI went to the NY Film Festival for the first time in years last night and saw David Cronenberg?s A Dangerous Method, a movie about the…
Comments closedIn this article on nightmares in the WSJ, there is the following paragraph:
Comments closedI came across a very interesting post by Sam Harris about the difficulties of getting paid for being an artist, a writer, or a public intellectual.
Comments closed