SLSL Intro "Our Common Nightmare"

[Wasted Words]

A good introduction to Wiener. 

http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/agora/InformationLanguageSociety.html

Our common nightmare need not be a bomb. It can be any
machine, any formula that we fall in love with. 

I remember when stochastic models ruled the world of
finance in the '80s.  it was just too sad to see
people, smart people, not the stupid greedy people
that hollywood and trash novels spun on the public
consciousness, but bright, hard working, ethical
people with huge fudiciary responsibility become such
fools at the mercy of formulas and Bloomberg machines.


I remember the old men, like Puddings in finance they
survived the previous "wars" and so they "pulled the
trigger" as we used to say because they were the men
that signed the checks. They didn't know the half of
what was going on. There were Pointsman too, men that
would put something in the old man's coffee so he
would be in the John when a deal was made. They would
slide the check into the stall, saying, "My word is my
bond." 

But our common nightmare was the machines and the
models we came to love and trust that none of us
really understood until they broke down and failed. We
would have been better off tossing darts at the Wall
Street Journal tables but we were a house in a
whirlwind and when the house landed we charted a
course with Slothrop's map in black and white.
Eventually we went back to standing around the cherry
tree and eating plain vanilla and we created the
largest market in the world, cut it up into yellow
bricks and strolled down the road to the land of E
Pluribus Unum because ironically Reagan's Voodoo
economics, which no model and no machine could make
sense of,  saved us all. 







__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus – Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com