Trying out Ozan's spreadsheet literature review method.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
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Taleb, Pilpel, "On the Unfortunate Problem of the Nonobservability of the Probability Distribution", 2nd draft, 2004An excellent overview of decisions under certainty, risk, and uncertainty.Four generators (Binomial, Gaussian, Poisson-jump mixture of Gaussians, and Levy) and the convergence/sampling properties. |
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Winiarski, "Quasi-Monte Carlo Derivative Valuation & Reduction of Simulation Bias," MS thesis, 2003
On reducing the variance of Monte Carlo estimates using quasi-random sequences! |
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Jaynes, Probability Theory (2003)Jaynes states the two ironclad syllogisms from logic:(1.1) if A is true, then B is true <==> A is true; therefore, B is true. (1.2) if A is true, then B is true <==> B is false; therefore, A is false. Then he states weaker syllogisms: (1.3) if A is true, then B is true <~~> B is true; therefore, A becomes more plausible. (1.4) If A is true, then B is true <~~> A is false; therefore, B becomes less plausible. (1.5) If A is true, then B becomes more plausible <~~> B is true; therefore, A becomes more plausible. He then notes, (emph. mine): With the other kinds of reasoning, (1.3)–(1.5), the reliability of the conclusion changes as we go through several stages. But in their quantitative form we shall find that in many cases our conclusions can still approach the certainty of deductive reasoning (as the example of the policeman leads us to expect). P´olya showed that even a pure mathematician actually uses these weaker forms of reasoning most of the time. Of course, on publishing a new theorem, the mathematician will try very hard to invent an argument which uses only the first kind; but the reasoning process which led to the theorem in the first place almost always involves one of the weaker forms (based, for example, on following up conjectures suggested by analogies). The same idea is expressed in a remark of S. Banach (quoted by S. Ulam, 1957): Good mathematicians see analogies between theorems; great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.
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Brown, Poker Face of Wall Street (2006)I'll just include excerpts for now that reflect some of the very fun ideas in here. (This entry might need to go under "Skepticism.")It's easy to say that there's no alternative to gambling, that you take risk by getting out of bed in the morning or crossing a street. That's true enough, but you can try to avoid unnecessary risk. More important, you can avoid uncalculated risks; you can always look before you leap. It's hard to win much that way, though. Other people snap up the riskless profits pretty fast and bid the price of calculable risk opportunities to near their fair values. Things get a lot less crowded if you go for the incalculable risks, leaps of faith that cannot be inspected carefully before takeoff. So that is where you find extraordinary opportunities. If you can tolerate what life offers in low- and calculable-risk opportunities, you should take it. That is the defining strategy of the middle class, but it can be adopted by anyone, rich or poor. Choose a career in a low-risk field, and get plenty of good training. Be nice to everyone. Select sound investments; make conventional choices; pay your taxes; obey the law. Do a little better every year than the year before, and raise children who will do a little better than you. For many people, this is the American Dream. For others, it's the only sensible choice, the only kind of life that allows happiness without achieving it at the expense of someone else. This book is for the rest of us, the ones who cannot imagine living that way. That's point one. Point two. For most of history, there wasn't a big middle class. There were rich and poor, life was risky for both, and everyone gambled. The growth of the middle class began in seventeenth-century Holland. Europeans who achieved middle-class security generally stopped gambling and soon afterward tried to get everyone else to stop. But in the United States, the middle class grew so large by the nineteenth century that a sizeable population began to try to escape it. Europeans were shocked to see the western frontier populated not only by drifters and refugees, but also by prosperous easter farmers who wanted more land who risked ruin and death for the chance to get rich. Other successful people moved west to escape conformity---social, religious, or otherwise. Traditionally in world history, mines were worked by slaves or oppressed peasants. In the United States, college graduates, clerks, and men with property flocked to mining camps all over North America (to dig and play poker). All of them threw away middle class security to bet their lives and fortunes for wealth or freedom... This is a very attractive narratization. A third point I've been wondering about for some time: Economists sometimes argue that these transactions [such as bond trades, derivative sales, etc.] contribute to capital allocation and provide important price discovery. But most capital allocation takes place outside the trading markets an, anyway, is far too indirect to justify the amount of trading that takes place. This is turning out to be an intense book. "Like astrologers of centuries past, economists have to be smart and disciplined enough to master the science and mathematics required for their craft, and they have to be shrewd analysts to make a living, because their fundamental theory is wrong. If you look in ecnomics for the theoretical clarity that will help you get rich, or manage a nation's economy, or predict the outcomes of various actions, I think you will be as disappointed as if you had consulted a horoscope." "As an investor, you can buy a stock with a 20-year history of steadily growing profits and completely honest and tranparent accounting without one penny of those profits ever being tested in the sense of contributing to something anyone actually bought." The central problem with being a fundamental value type. This is one of the most interesting and fresh books I've read. If I were to write to Dr Brown, I'd say something along the following lines: 'My favorite parts of your book were where on John Law and Fischer Black, especially you assert that John Law would have intuitively understood that "it's the sizzle, not the steak" and this idea that people do things (like trade or work) not to improve their stock or to be happy but to have fun. I also was struck by the related statement you make later, that gambling (via options) was an energizing jolt to the American economy in the 70s through the 80s ("a full-body X-ray"), and that the economic miracle of that era has options traders to (partly) thank. I also liked the undercurrent through the work that states that poker is a window to understand the real reasons behind people's actions (beyond "utility"), so I'm going to read "Poker for Dummies" and start playing with some friends. |
| 8 | Brenner, Brenner, Brown, A World of Chance: Betting on Religion, Games, Wall Street (2008)This book is popping.In small societies, there are no markets, no specialization, no large numbers. 'But people must decide. Beliefs and institutions bestow legitimacy on decisions, suggesting that things are "under control."' But when circumstances change, such beliefs and institutions may not change. 'Milan Kundera once observed that stupidity was not ignorance, but the nonthought of received ideas.' This is shaping up to answer as its central question, "how do we legitimize decisions to act?" (from proto-historic times to today). This seems to be a more useful question to us skeptics than "how do we act when we cannot decide what to do?" since we obviously device. We create mythologies to legitimize those decisions that come naturally to us, mythologies & religions that encode societal knowledge, prejudice, or more recently, academic and professional self-serving. From Barker & Evans on Bayesianism: "The concept of probability is important [when] despite large uncertainties, one has a moral obligation to act on a rational basis"; this has some relevance here. |
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Makridakis, Hogarth, Gaba, Dance with chance: making luck work for you (2009)"The data available suggests that luck is almost entirely responsible for which hardworking, determined,educated, and experienced people make it in life" (p 6).This sentence and this book make me believe that skepticism is being rediscovered and reborn, having rested many centuries since it was last called out to battle dogmatism. People are finding dogmatic explanations and predictions for things that are important to them quite poor, and leave much unmodeled and thus swept under the stochastic rug. The book is setting itself up as not just another airport thumb-through on probability, but also a "self-improvement" book, in the way Sextus' oeuvre can be thought of as self-improvement and thought conditioning: chance (things we can't control, things we hadn't thought of) figures greatly in our best-laid plans. But if it is participating in the rediscovery of skepticism, it is taking baby steps, either ignorant of or ignoring the Pyrrhonian tradition of aporia upon contemplation of two equipollent contentions, and so it seems to occasionally relapse into dogmatic and unprobabilistic thinking. For example. Their gambit is this argument that after 9/11, many people chose to drive instead of fly and therefore many more people ended up dead or hurt on highways instead of arriving safe at destination airports, and attribute this apparently sub-optimal decision on the part of thousands of people to 1) a lack of understanding of probability, and 2) a commitment to the illusion of control. I wonder why they didn't consider the fact that security was much tighter in the months and years following 9/11, and resulting delays worse, or more importantly, the fact that driving seems sub-optimal to flying only because there weren't any further hijackings. Why engage in half-way after-the-fact thinking like this? Might as well go the whole (Pyrrhonian) way and conclude that at the time it was unknowable whether an extra 5'000 travelers would die in our skies and render all those flyers-turned-drivers very smart---and reach the aporetic state of being unable to decide whether flying or driving was truly better at the time. Perhaps this kind of half-way skepticism is due to the slow reinvention of skepticism, or maybe the book is just unreflective and journalistic (being written by three business professors). But I cannot judge---it is very possible that such a piecemeal reexploration of skepticism is the best course for our society to take, rather than a rediscovery of the whole ancient Greek or pre-Modern French shebang. We can maybe make some new breakthroughs that will be useful for us for many years hence. The book stresses the point that uncertainty does not lead to paralysis, and that knowledge of uncertainty can lead to novel and rational decisions that do benefit us. With this message, the book is fantastic. But if indeed skepticism is today ascendant, a time will come when dogmatism will once again have its place, either because it serves a legitimate purpose or by chance, and we should keep a sharp skeptical eye to embrace dogmatism when that happens. "Great achievers – in chess as in many other fields – have been found to practice, on average, roughly the same number of hours every day, including weekends and holidays. Finally, research indicates that the more they practice in this way, the better their performance. Continuous, painstaking practice facilitates “deeper” or better information processing and helps retain, as well as develop, skills. Curiously, it seems that, to become good at blinking, there’s a lot of painful thinking along the way." (Chap. 11) "There is clearly much food for thought and plenty of inspiration in their accounts of business success or failure. The theorists also provide an important historical record besides identifying the broad issues to which managers should pay attention. But it's equally clear that we can't count on research studies based on detaield dissection of past performance as a guide for the future." (p. 110) The question for the behavioral economists and human evolutionary theorists is: whence the perpetual desire for a new guru with a new stupid formula for success? A shocking thought: maybe it's not all that bad; maybe managers somehow "know" that gurus aren't offering them anything that they don't know, and gurus are filling some very mundane need (maybe the need to relax at work). (This is fun: when asking 'why do people frequently do X where X is bad,' ask whether X may be good in some other way you haven't considered, and the good it does outweighs the bad that you've decided to focus on. [Then you can think about trying to become a guru yourself, with the message that, 'X is bad!' and try to convince enough people that you're onto something that they'll cover your living expenses for a few years.]) This book is terrible in other ways: "In chapter 5, we dabbled in the stock market and found that the short and medium term were all about flux and unpredictability. However, we also discovered that --- in the long run --- the only way was up." Note that there are many stock markets, and most of them today are at 0. The pre-Bolshevik stock market or the early 1900s Argentine stock market also enjoyed long periods of increasing returns before their doomsday. This "advice" by the book is very dangerous; Taleb mentions how his family were great at accumulating the wrong assets ("Italian lira, Lebanese bonds"). I first read it in Marc Faber: "In the very long term, all financial instruments go to 0." |
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Mérő, Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty (1998, trans. Gösi-Greguss)p199. Technology helps the decision-making process but it cannot replace the decision-makerPreface: This book is in the form of an essay. It is intended to be read rather than studied. Therefore I did not stick to the fundamental rules of textbook writing namely that the material be east to learn, easy to teach, and easy to examine on -- usually at the expense of being slightly boring. Rather my aim was to meet the demands of the reader seeking mental adventure. p117. Whether or not a game is competitive is often determined by circumstances, and not by the rules of the game. Armed with the golden rule and the categorical imperative we can transform many competitive situations into purely cooperative ones. Nut the opposite is equally true. Often competition is the best way of achieving useful cooperation. p125. A theory [group vs gene selection] can give quantitative results only if the values of the possible outcomes are known. There are quite a few papers that appear to confirm one theory of the other, and in quite a few papers the experimental results do not confirm the predictions of either theory. Physicists found themselves in a similar situation when they were attempting to determine whether the nature of light I'd corpuscular or wavelike. When experiments were carried out with particle detectors light replied "yes indeed I am composed of corpuscles; you can measure their impact. But when light was measured with instruments to detect waves, light was saying [via interference patterns] "yes indeed I am made Of waves". Light is as it is but it can act both ways depending on what we ask of it. If the question is asked whether natural selection acts at the level of genes or species, nature cannot help but follow light's example. It gives an answer to the question posed, regardless of the real character of evolution. p152. Using the methods of game theory the basic idea of quantum mechanics [atom bomb, microelectronics, lasers] can be paraphrased as follows: the elemantary particles realize the idea of a mixed strategy. As we know from game theory mixed strategies often provide the only possibility for reconciling diversity and stability. p165. Actual ideal chance [true indeterminism, not just lack if knowledge of all relevant hidden parameters] is a significant guiding principle that plays a role in the world of electrons and genes and perhaps even to human thinking |
| 7 | Mandelbrot, The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (2004) 1. Looking
at the figure on p113, of monthly standard deviations of the US stock
market from 1885 to 2000, from Schwert 2004, my goal may be to survive
first and flourish second (not die if I can't flourish) no matter what
the curve does in the future: every peak in it is surpassed by bigger
one, every anomalous event pales in comparison to the next
earthshattering anomaly. Such a time series exists for death (wars,
disease, famine), wealth, knowledge, etc., and I seek strategies to
maximize success across all of them. Do we avoid all unmeasurable risk
or do we take some, risking it all?2. After Montaigne. Sceptics are on the same bus as dogmatists: they both have to live with their fellow man, live in flux, live in uncertainty. While the dogmatists make predictions and decisions based on some perceived knowledge, the sceptics recognize the possibility of being deceived or incomplete in their experiences, and so delay accepting a dogma as truth; there is solely experimentation. (This attitude is self-referential: sceptics do not rule out the possibility that one day their searching will lead them to becoming dogmatists. That day doesn't seem to have arrived yet.) Observing their dogmatic friends make mistakes due to incomplete knowledge or mistaken deduction, the sceptics have come to recognize certain human traits to watch out for.
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Skepticism
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Mates, The Skeptic Way, 1996An excellent translation and good accompanying critical examination of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism.My introduction to PyrrhonismI started like any other person or philosopher, trying to achieve tranquility and make sense of the world external to our senses and independent of it from my senses and my recollection of ancient history and my own memories. Sextus Empiricus, in his own quest, found there to be three ways of dealing with the many conflicting explanations made for the same observations. The Dogmatists say they have found the truth. The Academic skeptics, unable to judge between endless competing dogmas, say that the truth can never be found. And the Pyrrhonean skeptic, also unable to judge between competing dogmas, suspends judgement and continues searching, and surprisingly discovers that the tranquility and peace of mind he longed for followed soon thereafter.I started as a Dogmatist. For example, I pondered the spectrum of economic theories between socialism and Hayekian free markets. The examples of Soviet Russia or Maoist China conflict with Christian Socialists and Cooperativists of Britain or Fourier of France, and the Russian experiments of Bakunin or Kropotkin (whom I know nothing about). The Hayekian supporters advance America and Hong Kong as examples, but also flounder on many of the details. Or I pondered the efficient market hypothesis and modern portfolio theory as a suitable way to invest, and then upon reading Faber and Taleb, learned how grossly practitioners of those theories overestimate diversification. As a Dogmatist, I switched allegiances every few years, unwilling to conclude from these finite number of examples that the truth was unknowable, until a third possibility was presented by way of Taleb and Sextus. Although it was not exactly tranquility I sought, choosing between equipollent and contradictory dogmas clearly allows enormous suffering to be a matter of chance! (A quick point to make: both the Academic and Pyrrhonist skeptics were labeled "skeptics" in ancient Greece, and this causes occasional confusion. [Sextus actually views the Academicians as Dogmatists since they hold a claim about the external world to be true---which is that the external world is unknowable. And this sole Academic offense against true skepticism is far more agreeable than modern skepticism which occasionally holds that knowledge itself does not exist. Grotesque!]) The Pyrrhonean skeptic has over his life encountered many equipollent but contradictory explanations of what the senses convey and has suspended judgement thus far (and enjoyed the resulting tranquility), but can see no reason to believe that tomorrow will be the same or different. In an engineering sensibility, this corresponds to the inverse problem: many models can explain the same data. In science, as Popper has demonstrated, a theory is only provisionally "accepted" in that we build devices using it as yet another test of the theory. Indeed a scientific theory, as opposed to pseudoscientific theories like astrology, psychoanalysis, or post-WW1 Marxism [Conj. & Refut.], lays out (usually in its mathematics) the conditions that must be met for it to hold. There remains a lot I have yet to learn about skepticism, including its link to science, and the world of invisible pores on the skin and invisible atoms, but this above is what I have learned so far. Excerpts
The opening paragraphs of Mates' analysis follow (though they are not nearly as lucid and useful as the opening salvos of the Outlines): |
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Bailey, Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonean scepticism, 2002This is the first book that I started reading officially on the topic. The first chapter is called "Scepticism and rationally-justified belief" and really nicely lays out some results from modern logic (Gettier's 1963 paper, which I haven't read) that lead to the conclusion that justified belief is not knowledge and which lead to a sort of zombie revival of scepticism: modern skepticism is very different than anything the Greeks or the Europeans (or the ancient Indians for that matter) contemplated and seems steeped in Enlightenment ideas (which I am interested in because according to Taleb, the Enlightenment has wrought more harm than good).The first half of the book seems to be a study, explication du philosophe style, of skepticism from Pyrrho down to Sextus. The second half appears to be a philosophical analysis of Sextus' brand of skepticism. Upon learning this I decided to read Mates' translation of Sextus' Outlines (above). |
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Raynor, The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it), 2007I put this business strategy book under skepticism because that's what I'm trying to combine: business and rational decision-making. |
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Neto, "Academic Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy", Journal of the History of Ideas 58.2 (1997), pg. 199-220This provides some useful background as I start reading Montaigne, Brochard, and Foucher. |
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Montaigne, Essays (1592, ed. Screech, 1991)An apology for Raymond Sebond (II: 12)'What ought I choose?' --- 'Anything you wish, so long as you choose something.' A daft reply! Yet it seems to be the one reached by every kind of dogmatism which refuses us the right not to know what we do not know.! (p 562)Pyrrhonians: it does not matter who attacks them, as long as somebody does. Anything serves their purpose: if they win, your argument is defective; if you do, theirs is. If they lose, they show the truth of Ignorance; if you lose, you do. If they can prove that nothing is known: fine. If they do not succeed in proving it, that is fine too. 'Ut quum in eadem re paria contrariis in partibus momenta inveniuntur, facilius ab utraque parte assertio sustineatur' [So that by finding equally good causes for and against on the very same subject it is easier to suspend one's judgement about either side: Cicero]. Rien ne semble vray qui ne puisse sembler faux. Leur mot sacramental, c'est ἐπέχω ; c'est à dire, je soustiens [To them, nothing seems true which cannot also seem false. They have sworn loyalty to the word ἐπέχω, epoche: 'I am in suspense']. He goes on to say how the Pyrrhonists choose to act in accordance with their natural inclinations and customs of righteousness. Many find this unpalatably archaic? However! he next asks: How many disciplines [ed.: and theories] are there which actually profess to be based on conjecture rather than on knowledge, and which, being unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, merely follow what seems likely?That is, the dogmatic traditions can claim to do no better than following their own inclinations and perceptions of likelihood. This makes them as unreliable as the Pyrrhonists, but the following makes them even worse: by not acknowledging their own ignorance, they compound the suffering they inflict on themselves and others. (Montaigne closes the paragraph with: "Pyrrhonians say that truth and falsehood exist: within us we have means of looking for them, but not making any lasting judgement." [ed.: Maybe disagreeing and clarifying here: ... 'but haven't yet found a way to make lasting judgement.']) He then launches into a discussion on how religion and Pyrrhonism are perfect complements, and how God can carve letters into the blank slate of the Pyrrhonist mind, stripped as it is of affectations of intellect, etc. Never mind that. This addresses bit here addresses an option that some have found attractive: becoming knowledgeable about the many competing dogmas. Aristotle regularly piles up many different opinions and beliefs, so as to evaluate his own against them. He shows how much farther he has gone and how much nearer he has approached to probability. Aristotle is the Prince of Dogmatists; and yet it is from him we learn that greater knowledge leads to further doubt.
Restated in statistical parlance, generating more theories from a fat-tailed random theory-generator does not reduce error of estimating the Truth. This is a strikingly modern observation:Not only Aristotle but most philosophers [ed.: and experts in error-prone dogmas] aim at being hard to understand; why?---if not to emphasize the vanity of their subject-matter!
And of course the classic bombshell (p. 566):Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.
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Sherden, Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions (1998)I have been waiting for this book for several months!After discussing the CAC's methodology: correlating past temperature/precipitation patterns with environmental conditions that affect weather: "If unseasonably high precipitation occurred in the state of Washington at the same time that an unusually warm body of water emerged off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, then one might assume---logically, but naively---that a recurrence of the warm Pacific water the following year would against bring unseasonably high precipitation to the state of Washington. This is another example of analog-based methodology, which is flawed ... There is an almost infinite number of weather patterns that could result from any of these persistent environmental conditions or combinations of conditions. Thus, the next occurrence of warm ocean water off the coast of the Pacific Northwest might cause a drought in Washington and floods in California." (page 44).
This qualitative restatement of an important characteristic of nonlinear systems might have an essential role in probabilistic studies of complex systems: the same inputs to the system at different times result in violently different outcomes. This is obvious to readers of Titus Livy, whose histories are anything but dry. (I have heard the same said for experiments in cellular biology.) Makridakis, et al., say something to the same effect (copied here): "There is clearly much food for thought and plenty of inspiration in their accounts of business success or failure. The theorists also provide an important historical record besides identifying the broad issues to which managers should pay attention. But it's equally clear that we can't count on research studies based on detaield dissection of past performance as a guide for the future." This phrase is unofficially trademarked: "Business is just a series of fads, interspersed with accidental discoveries and products that accidentally win big." Biological evolutionary life is like this too. |
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Arthur, Increasing returns and path dependence in the economy (1994) The opening salvos of this work are exactly what I am looking to get a better handle on, to hone my Pyrrhonism. After discussing enzyme kinetics, autocatalysis, thermodynamics, "Outcomes are not predictable, problems might have more than one solution, and chance events might determine the future rather than be averaged away." Systems with positive feedback have similar properties; "There was typically more than one long-run equilibrium outcome. The one arrived at was not predictable in advance; it tended to get locked in; it was not necessarily the most efficient; and its 'selection' tended to be subject to historical events. If the problem was symmetrical in formulation, the outcome was typically asymmetrical." His colleagues and he have generalized the Polya process (which is similar to the Chinese restaurant process with a finite & fixed number of tables). He is making very, very important (for me, and strong) observations against post-hoc explanations for how things have turned out. I include two here. On clock faces, e.g., 12 versus 24 hour clocks, and clockwise versus counterclockwise, "The author argues that chance events coupled with positive feedback, rather than technological superiority, will ofter determine economic developments."  We want to very tentatively use such empirical anecdotes and such mathematical models (which may or may not apply well to the world) to say something about how unknowable our actions' effects are. As a Pyrrhonean skeptic, I remain open to the possibility that these studies will yield actionable policy recommendations for decision-making under such uncertainty. A major manifestation of increasing returns is companies get better at something in proportion to how much they do it. However, "Increasing-returns mechanisms do not merely tilt competitive balances among nations; they can also cause economies---even such successful ones as those of the United States and Japan---to become locked into inferior paths of development... [that are] difficult to escape. " Note! "Early superiority is no guarantee of long-term fitness." Although this is driven by physics and economics, much of such reasoning applies to the ecology of species alive today. Chance happenings (within the mild randomness-afflicted dictates of natural selection) dominate what we see. E.g., "The debate over giraffe necks illustrates the pitfalls of trying to figure out past evolutionary pressures based almost solely upon living animals (and just one living species, at that). Studies involving the benefits of having a long neck to feeding or intrasexual competition might be informative, but what giraffes do now might not tell us much about what caused their ancestors to evolve long necks. We should not confuse what an organ is used for now with what led to its origin: they are not always the same" (from Switek) Ah. "When we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic institution over its competitors [known & many unknown, ---ed. note] we should then be cautious of the standard exercise that seeks the means by which the winner's innate 'superiority' came to be translated into adoption. ... Where diminishing-returns technologies compete it is usually best to let the superior aggregate choice reveal itself in the outcome that eventually dominates. But in the increasing-returns case, laissez-faire gives no guarantee that the 'fittest' technology will be the one that survives." |
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The Halo EffectI like how it talks about stories and our love of them. |
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On my bookshelf
A lot of early modern (serious and pragmatic) philosophy, especially Foucher and Brochard who Taleb cites as his antecedants (along of course with Sextus &co). I am mainly interested in the applications of scepticism to modern studies, such as science, business, risk management, medicine, etc. There appears to be precious little modern follow-ups to Adversus mathematikos but I was pleased to learn about the following:
If these are in the vein of M, in that they bring the old skeptical arguments to bear in novel ways to modern problems, I will be most happy. Many of the above works are skeptical in character without being overtly Phyrrhonist. The strength of the Pyrrhonian position may be in that it limits prediction error. While the ancient Greeks seem to have not been too interested in verifiable secular predictions, we are!
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Software design
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Armstrong, "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors", PhD dissertation, 2003I'm making good progress in this. I'm hoping it'll give me important insight into how Erlang actually aids in the architecting and maintenance of complex software. |
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Biology
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Radford, et al., "The mechanism of folding of Im7 reveals competition between functional and kinetic evolutionary constraints", Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (1 March 2009)Apparently, it's a complicated path for the protein between the ribosome and its native state, and it frequently takes more than one try, despite heavy evolutionary pressures toward reliable proteins (especially when these proteins are essential). |
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Ridley, The Agile Gene (2003)Several very provoking results of genetic research (and several hackneyed uninteresting ones billed as controversial or astonishing). Alludes to body and limb patterns via transcription factors inherited and preserved by a very early ancestor.Transcription factors! "The genome is not a blueprint for constructing a body; it is a recipe for baking a body. The chicken embryo is marinated for a shorter time in the Hoxc8 sauce than the mouse embryo." (And presumably both much shorter than a python.) "A chimp has a different head from a human being not because it has a different blueprint for the head, but because it grows the jaws for longer and the cranium for less long than does the human being. The difference is all timing" (timing mediated by transcription factor genes!). Dogs have more underdeveloped brains than wild wolves and foxes (less time to marinate), and this reduces adult emotions such as fear & aggression (and presumably paranoia). The same is true for human cranial volume, which has been decreasing for the last 15k years. The first gene to be identified as different between chimps and humans was for an enzyme to process sialic acid, possibly related to brain development in early humanoids; amazing! Gender is definitely genetic: hermaphrodite twins; very unsavory scientist. |
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Margulis, Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (1997)This fantastic little book... I was rereading bits of it on the Oxygen Catastrophe: "The difference between nonnucleated bacterial cells and cells with nuclei is far greater than that between plants and animals. Before cyanobacteria split water molecules and produced oxygen, there was no indication that the Earth's patina of life would ever be more than an inconspicuous scum lying on the ground.By the middle of the Proterozoic Eon 1,500 million years ago most of biochemical evolution had been accomplished. ... With the exception of a few exotic compounds, such as the essential oils and hallucinogens of flowering plants and the exquisitely effective snake venoms, prokaryotic microbes can assemble and disassemble all the molecules of modern life." |
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Wagner, "Neutralism and selectionism, a network-based reconciliation," Nature Reviews Genetics (December 2008)This paper is the first I've been reading on the neutral theory of molecular evolution and is key. Paraphrasing, both the neutralist and selectionist camps disagree on the relative importance of "effectively neutral and beneficial mutations." However, the beneficence of a mutation is strongly dependent on the ephemeral environmental and ecological context it finds itself in. Mutations that seem beneficial under some conditions might appear neutral (or worse) in others. Furthermore, the frequency path of such a mutation in a population over time may be due to reasons partly or entirely divorced from the mutation itself, instead depending on the surrounding context (environmental or ecological). The more useful and accurate interpretation is that a mutation's neutrality or beneficence is a random variable dependent on the surrounding conditions, and the mutation's course from origin to extinction is a random process dependent on the path traversed by its environment. (Note that the dependence here is not entirely determined by the historical contexts---it's still random given them.)The implication of this latter observation is that explaining a mutation's career in hindsight is fraught with risk, and forecasting anything about a candidate mutation incurs large, possibly infinite prediction error. The validation and quantification of this theory is now the task at hand. The fiction writers can extend it to human institutions. Organisms also probably have meta-evolved so that, given a randomly changing environment, they have the ability to revert to an older allele-set; organisms that balanced gene duplication with its costs would have a definite advantage. (This process might be very sophisticated: viz., breeding foxes for tameness engenders several other morphological traits.) "Schultes and Bartel succeeded in transforming [two unrelated] markedly different molecules into one another through a mutational walk through sequence space that required some 40 mutations. Importantly, through most of this walk the enzymatic activity of the mutated molecule does not change dramatically, providing evidence for a genotype network for enzyme activity. Halfway through this walk, four mutations alone were sufficient to change the activity of one enzyme into that of the other." "The more robust a molecule is, the more likely it is that mutations in it are neutral, and that they do not change the structure and function of the molecule. Strikingly, the stable and more robust variants of cytochrome P450 more readily evolved the ability to hydrolyse new substrates." |
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West, Where medicine went wrong: rediscovering the path to complexity (2006)The author's thesis is that as a result of the last 300 or so years of advances in law, politics, probability, and statistics, Western society has become overly obsessive with the expectation of random variables and random processes, and that the study of the variability of these would be very fruitful. This of course leads to rejecting homeostasis (something we are used to thinking about thanks to Art de Vany), but he more than most is interested in the historical analysis of our society's overriding emphasis on expectation and first moments. |
Discarded
- Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1993). Abandoned this very early, probably unjustly; got angry at how professional it was.
