I’m pretty capitalist, but the idea that markets are the smartest large-scale entities we’ll ever invent is deeply depressing. This is why I’m always intrigued by *interesting* distortions. Not tawdry cronyist power grabs, but other kinds of weird unplanned distortions.
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Interesting distortions include: reason (eg planning), urgent temporal forcing functions (climate change), low liquidity regimes and “art” pricing, ‘economics of pricelessness’, bureaucracy (= human GOFAI), smart contracts, HFT, exotic securitized instruments...
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Problem with all these distortion ideas is that they are almost always easier to hack than use as intended. Cf the Lebowski theoremhttps://mobile.twitter.com/Plinz/status/985249543582355458 …
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Still, out of every 100 ideas to do better than today’s market, if 99 are easier to hack than use, 1 is a genuine advance within or outside the ‘market’ paradigm. So I like the idea of an eternal arms race between markets and imaginative attempts to distort them.
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You’ll always end up with one of 3 things: A new kind of criminal (99%) A new kind of market (0.9%) Something smarter than a market (0.1%)
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Dumb view: both markets and distortions are eternal patterns. Free-market fundamentalist view: markets evolve, distortions don’t Reactionary view (both left and right): markets are static but my new kind of distortion will deliver utopia Ze Truth: Arms race. Both evolve.
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+42000 on the ai angle. Such a failure of imagination
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The popularity of this belief is puzzling to me given how easy it is to show how wrongheaded gradient descent for global optimization is, and how this is routinely a part of basic education on optimization. Contagious wishful thinking?
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On that note, have you seen James Mickens’ hilarious skewering of neural nets in his usenix keynote? It’s well worth watching https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/mickens …
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No... thanks
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