i just took a intro to philosophy class.. Got an A ... the instructor had a freaking hard on for Nietzsche... in my opinion the guy said alot of great stuff.. helped realized how in limbo we are with out determinism but still.. i have alot of crazy friends in the many years in AA that have said similar shit. haha and on top of that.. i don't think its a coincidence that he went crazy considering his philosophy.. besides anyone saying anything controversial gets alot of publicity.. WOW your a little perverted about how we killed God .. its like no one before that had ever taken ACID or something haha
Oh man, I love Nietzsche. He is like the patron saint for traders. It's a shame so many peeps get waylaid by the fringe elements and the crazyperson stuff, because Nietzsche's perspectives were mind-blowingly ahead of their time in lots of ways. One of the pillars of my thinking (in respect to markets) is fallibilism, taken from Soros, which is essentially a deep level conceptual awareness that you (or anyone) can always, ALWAYS, be wrong. It is not so much a form of embedded self doubt as a hyperrational way of viewing the world in terms of hypotheses, testable claims, possible outcomes, and so on. Another pillar of my thinking, taken from Nietzsche, is perspectivism, which wikipedia defines like this: Perspectivism is the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made. This is often taken to imply that no way of seeing the world can be taken as definitively "true", but does not necessarily entail that all perspectives are equally valid. To me perspectivism is ideally suited to being a market participant. Perspectivism recognizes, on a deep level, that there is no such thing as 'ultimate truth', only viewpoints and assertions rooted in specific historical / environmental / situational context. But at the same time, as a perspectivist you are wholly free to objectively critique the quality of various viewpoints and perspectives on a logic and utility scale. I will not try to argue there is a universal standard as to what constitutes good music, for example, but I can certainly make arguments as to why Mozart is preferable to Nicki Minaj (and why Nicki Minaj is not worth listening to). In markets, the opposite of the fallibilsts / perspectivists would be the true believers: Those guys who say markets HAVE to do this... or this scenario HAS to happen... or worst of all, those who view economic events through a Calvinist lens and believe markets HAVE to come to such and such moral resolution. The fallibilist / perspectivist foundation allows for a flexibility that the believers simply do not have. Zero Hedge is in some sense the cartoonish epiphany of this Calvinist true-believer, markets-as-morality play worldview. There is only one "right" or "moral" outcome for them, which, on some level, involves sinners either coming to repentance or fiery end. In similar form, John Paulson and apparently now Kyle Bass are examples of true believers whose fervent faith at one time worked for them, but has now turned on them. Nietzsche's deeper level views, and the seeming paradox (which is both necessary and resolvable) of not believing in truth yet hewing keenly to objective standards for both performance reasons and aesthetic reasons -- life is all about aesthetics, on a profoundly deep level -- are well worth considering imho. I highly recommend this lecture paper (quite accessibly written) for a better understanding of Nietzsche's ideas. Particularly part II - the section on "Analogy - Culture as Recreation." Here is an excerpt: The analogy I want to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which a large number of different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness. These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups: French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or what have you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities. The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. And they may well combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues. When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many of the participants in any one game have been aggressively convinced that their game is the "true" game, that it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent a lot of time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Hence, in addition [to] any one game itself, within the group pursuing it there have always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on. Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship which shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin which can be historically located. Rule books are written in languages which have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: the games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive games people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveal something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore "true" in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it were, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favorite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness. In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book (he points out that nature is "wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power--how could you live according to this indifference. Living--is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature" (Epigram 9). Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such rule books are mere "foreground" pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule books often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture (thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages which insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement). So how do we know what we have is the truth? And why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true. But why? Might they not be better off if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, having nothing to do with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, "only that which has no history can be defined," they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.
I wrote several papers on the guy... read all of soros books. Both him and taleb are big popper fans. But taleb isn't crazy about soros's attempts at philosophy ie reflexivity... failability is exactly great. I love philosophy. It has everything to do with trading. And behavioral economics. Ie Amos trversky. Prospect theory. No one can stand bleed slow strategies its counter intuitive and it hurts. Platonism is a disease haha. Sextus empiricus. I seriously think Plato fucked up what we really know of Socrates. Dick haha. I'm a skeptic!!
p.s. To further briefly add: When you really understand the power of Nietzsche's ideas, you come to the realization that reality itself is like the Matrix. Reality as you perceive it - and as I perceive it and as everyone perceives it - is a sort of "construct program." Certain rules, like the laws of physics, are immutable. But as Morpheus tells Neo before they fight for the first time, "Some rules can be bent. Others can be broken." Equipped with such awareness, the sufficiently creative and motivated individual can transform his own viewpoints and perspectives, in staggeringly powerful ways, to chosen objective or aesthetic ends. Such ends can include pursuing and attaining greatness if one chooses.
Reflexivity is another highly useful, and incredibly powerful, reflection on the same core set of ideas...
i My parents hate soros I think the guy has sick insight and balls! Reflexivity is to much like mean reversion to me. Mandelbrots fractals is rebellious math and pure goodness... guy was the shit... simple.... his fractal theory as the apply to markets beats soros. Soros is a god discretionary trader .. good intuitive master of the markets misperceptiins
I like Mandelbrot too, but reflexivity goes much, much deeper than just mean reversion... and is just as powerful in analyzing / understanding booms (outlier trend amplification) as it is for busts or returns to trend... I would say my personal experience is reversed. Fractals are a cool idea, but never advanced much beyond that for me, whereas reflexivity has proven amazingly useful in its breadth and depth of real world application.
Granted soros is more macro economic cycle oriented. And Mandelbrot is applied mathematics...predicting busts has to be the most profitable thing ever.. I'm a noob my fascination with trading started years ago but I've only been actively pursuing it around a year