Monday 12 March 2012

Out For The Count




If you think that things are getting any easier, you can probably forget it.  At present I am chasing round in circles, but who isn’t these days?

This one came from one of the family and I hope the FT link works to let you read the article.  It is about the mathematics of trading and computing, which is the way the world works or doesn’t work according to opinion.

It is a long article but you could scroll down to get the drift.


My thesis for a little time now is that hardly anyone in the media or government understands what is happening, or why and where we are going.

There is a Wikipedia article on Bayes’ Theorem, which I confess to having problems with.  Like where do I start and where do I finish? 

Luckily, my family member knows the bloke and can follow some of the squiggles.  He tells me that it is difficult and he finds it complicated.

This is what your future might depend on.  So if the wrong squiggle is in the wrong place or it should not really be a squiggle at all then it all goes wrong.

And we all go back to basics.




3 comments:

  1. I think the world is now so complex that you can earn a living from not knowing what you are doing, simply because nobody else does either.

    In times gone by this was not such a problem. Somebody higher up usually knew you were blagging it. Not now.

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  2. Bayesians rip classical statistics for having testing against the hypothesis x=0 to establish significance of an effect. Classicals rip Bayesians for poorly specified priors. Bayesian analysis does seem to offer a way of declaring one's perspective by making the methodology operational but at the expense of an antiseptic clarity that classical statistical treatments provide.

    The whole socialSTREAM thing reminds me of the SRI psycho-statistical analysis that spotted the "identity" people that emerged from the hippie generation. This was an earlier effort to tap into emotional leaders back when computing power limited the Masters' ability to track everyone. Put Thatcher and Reagan in power and probably transformed culture in ways many of us have yet to discover.

    Personally, I'm subverting all of this by not participating in twatter, fuckbook or any other network that is being leveraged for interests that are diametrically opposed to my own.

    Fight for humanity, it's not over!

    Self
    P.S. this blog still kicks universal ass along with ian welsh.

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  3. I think a Bayesian named Dale Poirier wrote some introductory texts with comparisons to standard treatments with extensions from there. It is not the easiest read but atleast covers the controversy.

    Please forget the inclusion of "having" in the first sentence above.

    Self

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