[Marxism] [Pen-l] Benoit Mandelbrot and the wildness of financial markets: SciAm

[Shane Mage]

On Mar 17, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Craig Brozefsky wrote:

> Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> writes:
>
>> the entities are new, he looked at me and gave me a nice big warm  
>> smile, and said, the dark  matter and dark energy compute and give  
>> the astrophysicists consistent  equations for their big-bang model  
>> universe, and the astronomers still
> publish and are believed that the data fits their big bang model, and
> the entities are new, so all is good. When the data trips over these
>>
>> entities and they think a few new dimensions or something is needed  
>> to
>> validate their model of the universe, they will want other new
>> entities, and evaluate them similarly.
>
> Well, if you're gonna throw out peer review, prediction,
> falsification, empiricism, and reproducability, and all other forms of
> verification that differentiate math, or astrophysics from boutique
> trading code development -- then yah, they're like kinda sorta maybe
> similiar.


Well, if you're gonna throw out Occam's razor and multiply entities  
whenever your model is falsified by data radically inconsistent with  
the predictions deriving from that model, you're empirically no  
better, and philosophically much worse.


Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos