Anti-platonism and good old American optimism

[Lisa & Ian Murray]

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