this thread is depressing. Lets assume you guys are right, that America is going down the tubes....what do we do? He mentioned friends with passports etc. Fuck that. Why don't they do something about it? Why dont YOU do something about it? If America is fucked than why dont we fix it?
I You go out there when no one wants to listen. You tell me what it's like to be laughed at, ostracized, and we had data. And they still fight. It's a lot harder than it looks. Money is very powerful enemy when it's turned against you. Now, America gets to see AIG, Fuld, Bear............ Wait till the bribery stuff comes out. But man, what a battle. And it looks like it's too late anyway.
[Sitting back quietly and watching yet another threatening and violent message publicly posted by Pabst, who seems to lose more of his mind each day.]
Thanks holmes ...sorry from all the mistakes. I was trying to write and trade at the same time. vix at 57 and 8 handles per 1min bar are fun fun. Trying to keep up...'cause I'm not sure if I'll ever see this type of cash machine ever again in my lifetime. Sheesh and I thought 1997... 1999-2000 were good.
I always get a kick out of watching someone who thinks they have strong debating skills employ a logical fallacy at the very foundation of an argument they are promoting. I guess your lack of higher education is to blame...
One of the most commonly used methods for "debating" on the Internet is the false premise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_premise It is also somewhat difficult to disprove, unless you are a clever debater yourself. Hence the success of the fallacy. What is more interesting is how whole ideologies radiate from false premises - i.e neo-cons, objectivism and others. Objectivists use an epistemological axiom falsely as the root for their radicalism.
Jesuits are often trained in rhetoric, they typically argue from conclusion, not to a conclusion. Past it will make some opinionated statement as if it were some fact in evidence (which it is not) then proceed to make a case accordingly. Easily demonstrate the preceding statement is false, then the house of straw crumbles. This is to say that rhetoric isn't effective on the sheeple, it obviously is. Bush's infamous "You are with us or you are with the terrorists" was a classic logical fallacy of a false dilemma, but it proved to be very effective in a world of political polarization and fear based thinking. Rhetoric is a tool of the politicians, a means to a political end, but not to be confused with a sound and logical argument intended to educate an audience.
Actually, this is called a "inverse problem" in mathematics. It is very efficient for how to plan, and "flesh out" in detail. It is also used in computer animation - see inverse kinematics. What is basically the central idea is to create a system extrapolated from the two points - starting and ending. That way you can always create very strong logics, which are contained to such a system and describes it fully. The problem is of course when you extrapolate outside such a system - and just start inferring nonsense. That happens a LOT - and most people are not aware of this - because they only understand the single system and see that it is coherent, then mistakenly extrapolate those beliefs outwards on other systems -- which is just simply lunacy of course. The worst happens with people who are totally mesmerized by such systems, and become fully submerged in its "reasoning" - completes total indoctrination and then are basically radicalists with their belief system rooted in that one system. That is how Abrahamic religions and all other belief systems where a "universally absolute truth" are used as an epistemological root, fundamentally corrupts even something basic as knowledge itself when extrapolated outside the system - and outwards onto others. The same thing happens to traders who incidentally find a "correlation" of some value formula that they think they can magically use outside the instant situational system they observed - then proceed to retrofit and scale the correctness of such beliefs extrapolated onto every market trading condition - when in fact it is a complex of intersecting systems with dynamic and varying degrees of influence - aka a chaotic system when seen as whole. Traders are perhaps especially receptive to such radicalism of systems, because so many believe in finding a "holy grail" and a system that will "magically empower them" with complete insight into the markets and trading. Sadly, they all crash at some time - when their belief system is totally outdated and completely faded away from realistic conditions of the ever changing market complex. That is what I found from my usage of pattern-generators and recognizers from using fuzzy logic, neural network MLP feed-forward and Bayesian + Hidden Markov model reasoning about the various situational conditions - something I started describing here on ET in 2004, I think it was - but those posts on automation and homebrew software are gone in the large sweep-up deletions that have happened. People become so invested in their beliefs that they have a lot of difficulty in changing - thought patterns and trading strategies alike. The brain itself invests into "patterns" of neurons and strong interconnections - so when you fully commit to something like a belief system like that - you are essentially entrenching yourself and your mindset. The key to sustainability lies within the ability to quickly adapt and the encompassing perception - keeping an open mind always and not discriminate varying factors - but recognize the variance in which they are fluctuating in their influence on markets. Being reductionist in the sense of complex adaptive systems is just beyond folly, and Occam's razor is simply meaningless in this context. When it comes to prediction and reasoning, the "inverse strategy" is of course fundamentally flawed, as you point out.