Lol. The funny thing about those arguments is that its only their abstractness that makes them popular; nothing useful. Have any class suggestions?
I took some Sociology classes in college including Collective Behavior. That was an interesting and relevant class for sure.
You're talking about psychology. What can you expect? All this is a popularity contest. People believe something to be true based on how they feel. Not what they think... Why do you think all the chicks buy all those self-help books... They feel psychology, not think of it. Irony is, a mind can't be thought, it can only be felt (as it is believed... and of course, it goes into a voodoo spirituality). Kinda sad that people don't realize how gay they are when they're posting psychology stuff. Still... people believe these things and want to believe in it. You can't tell a chick to stop acting like one... so you just accept and move on. "Delusional" but you just play along.... Philosophy is kinda fun. They argue, twist and debate about nothing. Useless? Sure. Interesting ways of applying rationalism. Yes.
Interesting idea. I like sociology a lot, but haven't yet taken any psychology. I don't think philosophy is at all useless, TSGann; it is the educational environment in which it is taught. In a class of 100, in which the tests are on memorizing theories and logic, maybe only 5 will ever be able to think and practice philosophy for themselves. Learning theories by itself means nothing. If you question all of them, that means something.
This thread is a bit off topic though. Has anyone taken any behavioral finance, and can reflect on that with any trading application?
Quite honestly, college is a total waste of time for would-be traders. Trading is one of those things that can only be learned by doing. I wouldn't have traded my college time for anything, but in a strict professional sense I'd be way better off to have saved the money and spent the time looking at charts. By all means take psych or finance classes if you find those subjects genuinely interesting, but otherwise you shouldn't bother.
College psychology courses teach little more than memorizing which psychologist gets credit for hypothesizing phenomenon that any 8 year old kid has already figured out
A bit biased based on your own trading... aren't you? Math? Statistics? Programming? Engineering? There's plenty of courses that can help. Of course, it's up to the person to apply them after you learn them. Just as there are bad doctors and great ones.
Cutten's remarks were right on in introducing the importance of using philosophy to sharpen and differentiate the mind. Empiricists don't really undermine logic and logical falacies but they did establish who the assigns what to whom in the interelationships that are important to understand. The Philosophy Department at Columbia had a course that pin point's Cutten's viewpoint. Then it was tuaght by Prof Danto but I'm sure it exists today under someone's tutelage: The Philosophy of History. The term of history need not be long. Often the stellar examples provided dealt with how to handle the future in terms of the past. Balancing the importance of things on the fulcrum of the Present is best explained philosophically and applied scientifically and emotionally. Skeptics do not deal with trust; they trade on it. The partnership with the market is founded on trust without exception. If a trader creates illusions, then it is in the absence of trust. There are many reasons why traders do not trust mostly because trust is not an intellectual determination. Behavioral finance has become a graduate major and many papers are churned from academia nowadays. Just following Lo's career is a lesson in itself. A trader's foundation is strongest when he gets past the provisional aspects of his relationship to the market. Cutten shows how "acceptance" works in establishing that foundation properly. The balance of taking the offer and having trust appear in the trade/market partnership is stunning. Until you put the hat in the closet, you will not begin to have a foundation. Intimacy comes from listening and accepting. There is nothing provisional. Acceptance is not intellectual. Most people figure out the markets, i. e., create their illusion of the market. A philosophical alternative is to listen and accept. what appears as a consequence is trust in the trader/market partnership. This is an explicit and intimate thing. The logic is: Listen>>>>accept>>>>trust>>>>>value. If you have trust in the partnership, then you can listen and have the market's offer present. The principal value of the trader/market partnership is the great value of the offer. The great value of the offer is that it is real and has supreme utility that came from the relationship logically and not intellectually. A very subordinant consideration is why the market is trusted. I spoke about the trader's requirement...... Listen , etc.... What is the reciprocal market's requirement. NADA the market has no requirement in the partnership. In logic, the market is always correct. This is a unilateral proposition that comes from (is based upon) the flow of information. Why is the market trusted? A. Because the trader listens>> accepts>>> has trust appear>>> and see's value B. Because the market is always right. C. Because BOTH are a requirement for the trader partnership to work. So what did your learn to trade expereince become? It was a violation of the above. Reread the Shizso (sp) post. He didn't make it. He is in the Fight or Flight Response (FFR) and 0 --2 deprived according to the Bohr Effect (BE). So are most of the other thread respondants. What is getting an edge? It is maintaining FFR and BE and not having C because A was not done and probably cannot be done from this point on because of conditioning and mental differentiation. Too bad. Cutten is correct and adding Philosophy of History may get you oriented to the market. But what gets you oriented to "you" and the requirement you are facing to have Trust appear in you trader/market partnership? Those courses, so far, haven't appeared. Courses come from research and applied results of research. LO, et al (MIT) did the "sweat tests" to determine FFR and BE are dominant in big money traders. He definitely proved what Shizso describes as his "real" trading/market partnership. You all accepted it and complimented him. The emotions of trading in a FFR and BE state (up to 50% 0 --2 deprived) are fear, anxiety and anger. The sympathetic state medically and psychologically speaking. What does it take to trade parasympathetically? Trust>>>>value>>>parasympathetic>>>>trader/market optimum relationship. Measure yourself and find out what coherence means. Incoherence is associated with the sympathetic state. Get an emvawe pc that measures, by fourier analysis the heart waveform spectrum. Don't just do stress measurments as behavioral finance is stuck with nowadays. Measure coherence (non stress) that results from A above. I probably should throw in some screen displays.
Jack Hershey, I'm talking about Hume. The major empiricist after Descartes who didn't have a solution to empirical skepticism, where the earlier empiricists like Berkeley and Leibniz gave a solution to empirical skepticism, which trusted God that their perceptions were coherent with reality. Their "solutions" are just as ridiculous as Descartesâ solution, which also depended on God. He argues that all we have is our perceptions. The way we connect them is completely habitual and unnecessary. Eg: We assume a book will drop if we let go of it, only because we expect it to, due to what we have seen in the past. It doesn't mean we are right or making a necessary claim. Our expecting it to drop doesn't mean anything, because if all we have is our perceptions, our perceptions teach us everything about the world and our perceptions lie to us all the time. We habitually assume and anticipate things, even though they could potentially be otherwise. Hume screws up science, because in science we're making claims of causality. Since we have no perception of causality, according to Hume, our notion of causality is absolutely ridiculous. If we apply Hume to trading, the same thing happens. We assume our setups are relevant to making profits, because we are assuming things that happened in the past(price action, chart formations, moving averages etc.) will influence the future price. Hume says our notions of the past "causing" the future are unreliable and completely fabricated by our unreliable habits of association, and he has pretty good arguments why. Hume basically screws up inductive logic (science) and reduces formal logic to inductive logic, Hume would argue both are based upon experience, and can be overthrown by experience. I don't believe him, I think he's mistaken in some important points. But anyway.... If you want a solution to Hume's skepticism, read Kant. BTW. The philosophy of history is covered mainly by Hegel, he's not an empiricist. But a great philosopher nonetheless.