BEg2 ch 28 fuzzy logic

[Michael Bailey]

“Back in the pits, I used to know this Christer coffee trader who told me
it was like  grace, something you don’t ask for. Just comes. Of course it
can also be withdrawn at any time. Like when I always knew which way to bet
on Eurodollars.

- non sequitur? Knowing which way to bet on Eurodollars doesn’t follow from
“it can be withdrawn at any time.”

That “it can be withdrawn” is not the lead-in to his next words, then, but
the culmination and capping-off of the previous lines, of what the
“Christer coffee trader told him,” I guess - he stops pursuing that
explanation, partly because the Christian formulation includes that
possible withdrawing by an external locus of control, and partly because in
advancing to trader from farmer he’s trying to get beyond the “faith of his
fathers” ?



The times we shorted Amazon, got out of Lucent when it went to $70 a share,
remember? It wasn’t me that ever ‘knew’ anything. But something did. Sudden
couple extra lines of brain code, who knows. I just followed along.”

- Here he draws the explanation on-board and conflates his brain with a
computer, mixing the metaphor. Pulling out of religious explanation in
favor of (pseudo)science.



         “But then . . . if it was that same weird talent that kept you
safe . . .”

         “How could it be? How could predicting market behavior be the same
as predicting a terrible disaster?”

“If the two were different forms of the same thing.”

         “Way too anticapitalist for me, babe.”


Why is that anti capitalist? The whole point of futures trading is to
supposedly “stabilize the market” and avoid supply chain disasters - within
the framework of “capitalism being a Good Thing.” Why wouldn’t “that talent
extending to saving him from personal disaster” be a natural extension?

I can only think that Horst isn’t buying totally into the whole “divine
right of captains of industry, elect v preterite predestination and I am of
the Elect,” just as he hadn’t bought into the “Christer” gratuitous Grace
explanation.

Which indicates a healthy lack of hubris? That idea makes it easier to like
him.

Plotwise, if he’d not had the “il ne sait quoi” to oversleep, bye-bye
Horst.
Natural for him to wonder.
Pretty reasonable not to have a solid explanation.