Anti-platonism and good old American optimism

Lisa & Ian Murray seamus at accessone.com
Mon Apr 3 16:22:53 PDT 2000


What always perplexes me about journalistic accounts of bulls vs bears is that no mention is ever made about the math and computer wizards on Wall Street and London etc. that help make the markets function. Faith in the stock market nowadays is faith in "android epistemology" and all those expert systems that can compute scenarios of future prices at a level of complexity that leaves day traders in the dust. Surely LTCM, Goldman Sach etc. must have a flipped out night shift tending all those machines and programs. Do investment strategies really have a fractal structure? If so, does the meaning of the "business cycle" become a timeworn metaphor? Do Markovian and other types of stochastic analysis improve forecasting horizons somewhat, or is there no temporal logic built into those programs at all? Evidence indicates that the attacks that triggered the Asian meltdown were rather well planned. That takes one hell of a lot of computing to accomplish. So how come those kinds of issues never come up in WSJ or NYT articles?

The technological spillovers from cold war science are just starting to reap their potential dividends, perhaps Wall Street is simply operating on the faith that there are plenty of smart people available to harvest all that knowledge [the Kurzweil's and Joy's]. I talk to tech folks in Redmond all the time and I've yet to come across deep anxiety regarding the economy; of course, when I mention the smog and larger ecological issues and how those problems are not always reflected in the price system [especially at the firm level] they politely change the subject...

Ian



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