Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In last year's round-up of the top financial stories, I mentioned that I was somewhat embarrassed that THAT list turned out to be as America-centered as it was. Seven of the stories (every one that was NOT about Ukraine) had a US locus. This year, I don't have that problem. This is a VERY international list.   Ukraine is still here, but only once, and the OTHER war that has dominated headlines this year, the Israel/Hamas war, makes its debut in these lists via its ramifications for shipping.  Actually, both wars are here with reference to shipping.  Likewise, the US is still a locus, but only of three of the twelve big stories: April, June, and November. Less than half of last year's. Two of our US based stories this year concern artificial intelligence as a new industry: the other, one of America's periodic games of chicken with a debt ceiling.  China gets and warrants more attention here than any other single country. It is the locus in four of our stories. Af...

  In physics, Stoicism contends that matter is in principle infinitely divisible, like the "infinitely divisible ooze" pictured. This put the founding Stoics at odds with the contemporary atomists They held, as well, that the active principle in the material world is pneuma, literally “breath,” but understood rather figuratively here. Pneuma exists as currents, and these currents combine in ways that give objects a stable, physical character.  In cosmology, the Stoics see the natural world as a single rational and creative God, who is a material body, the body of the whole, of which all objects are, so to speak, organs. In anthropology, Stoics see humans as parts of the natural world, with an important differentiating characteristic.  We are part of the world in that we are within the same bonds of cause and effect as the rest of it.  We are distinct in that we are aware of this situation.  This means that there are certain matters that are within our power:...

  Years ago someone asked on Quora if anyone could sum up each of the decades of the 20th century in 10 words or less. I took up the challenge. I will now offer you those ten concise summaries plus two more, one for each of the first two decades of the twentieth century. My apologies for the America-centered taste of the result. But have another glass of eggnog and enjoy it.  1. A canal in Panama shows off Yankee power to awe. 2. The Great War smashes sunny Edwardian optimism. 3. Stock prices can go up forever, can they not?  4. Trade barriers destroy the industrial base, introduce years of depression. 5. Another war, even worse than the last, splits the atom. 6. Two superpowers face off: no one presses the button. 7. Mao reasserts himself in China: Americans go to the moon. 8. The demise of gold and currency fixes: all values float.  9. Amid the demise of Lenin's experiment, Germany re-unites.  10.  You say "internet" a lot: what does it mean?  NEW CE...

At the start of 2023, specifically in the January 9th and 10th, I wrote here that there were five major and dramatic trials scheduled for the year. And 2023 was in fact a dramatic reckoning for lovers of litigation.  Let us block this out a bit. 1) I wrote first about the Alex Murdaugh case.  That one took place soon thereafter.  The prominent South Carolina lawyer was convicted of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul.  Alex M. is in prison and the inevitable appeal is underway... 2) I spoke, too, about the forthcoming trial of Robert Telles, a former public official in Nevada suspected of the murder of Jeff German, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Evidentiary disputes have delayed matters on this one, and it is now scheduled for April 2024.  3) Thirdly, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, a colossus in the cryptocurrency world at the time, now (given the guilty verdict in his trial for wire fraud and related matters) just a guy in the Brooklyn ...

  Recently, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania all testified to a committee of the House of Representatives on anti-semitism on college campuses. I will leave MIT out of the following and will comment on an important difference between the other two universities.   The difference: Harvard has people who are very good at portfolio management.  U.Penn does not have their equal.  Heck, books have been written about Harvard's endowment strategy.  Without going into the details of those books, they seek to explain how Harvard continues to make a solid stream of income from the money it received from donors decades ago.   Now, one might think that this would allow them to drop what students and their families have to pay in tuition. (HAHAHA you silly person.) No  ... what this does is allow Harvard's directors some freedom from the shifting whims of the donor class. They can respond to indignant alums when the latest...

 Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts.  Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it. On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness.   One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company. THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create con...

  The fundamentals of the science of physics that the 21st century has inherited from the 20th consist of two grand theories. On the one hand, there is the general theory of relativity [GR] set forward by Albert Einstein, confirmed by a wide range of experimental tests since. This holds (to put things very simply) that space-time is a continuous fabric that is distorted with all the matter and energy within it, while by the same token this background determines the flows of all that matter and energy. It is at its heart a theory about gravity and it is about certainties.  On the other hand, there is a body of quantum mechanics [QM], advocated by Niels Bohr and opposed in its earliest formulations by the aforementioned Albert Einstein. Quantum mechanics is all about indeterminacy and uncertainty. We can be sure about the location of a particle only if we are willing to accept some vagueness about its velocity. Or, we can fix its velocity only if we are willing to leave some vag...

It is that time of year again.  We ought to listen to this guy.  Damn those Seleucids! (2) Adam Sandler Chanukah Song - YouTube

Three distinct events. Very different, but oddly the same. Three parallel controversies.    December 1941. Japanese forces attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Evidence indicates that the Office of Naval Intelligence was aware of Japanese carrier movements in the days before the attack -- that the attack should not have come as a complete surprise to Admiral Kimmel and others in command in Hawaii.  There is a theory that goes much further, contending FDR knew about Japan's plans and decided no counter-measures would be taken because this looked like a quick way to get the US fully engaged in the war. September 2001. Islamofascist terrorists attack New York and the Pentagon. Evidence indicates a failure of communication, again, between intelligence and operations. A number of theories quickly develop going much further than that: one of them is , again, that the government knew exactly what would happen and allowed it, thereby also allowing its own imperialist "war on...

Justice O'Connor has passed away. May she rest in peace.  My first thought upon hearing of this sad event was about the CASEY decision in 1992, and about how this looks in retrospect.  Casey came just as a twelve-year period of continuous Republican occupation of the White House was ending. Clinton won the election that year -- before then, Reagan and the elder Bush had been President, and it was widely believed that they had put enough Federalist Society types on the High Court to ensure that ROE v. WADE was going to be overturned.  Yet Casey surprised people. Not only was ROE not overturned, what the court called its "essential holding" was specifically retained. This was due to the emergence of a  "centrist bloc" consisting of Antony Kennedy, David Souter, and ... Sandra Day O'Connor. Although their decisive opinion in CASEY was put out as a joint opinion -- no one author among the three -- O'Connor was the one of the three with the greatest seniorit...

 Given the box office success of Ridley Scott's epic NAPOLEON, I am reminded of the following thought from the guiding spirit of this blog, William James.  The essay is "The Importance of Individuals," one of a pair of essays in which he defends a sort of extended-Carlylean conception of history. I've discussed that conception in this blog before and will not go into it in particular now.  Just the one quick quote.  James writes, "Some organizing genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?"     Let us contemplate that thought without a lot of commentary from me:  I'll let Ridley Scott do the commenting.  I will only borrow from a dictionary a definition of supernumerary: "being in excess of the normal or requisite number." Presumably Bonaparte had more idiosyncra...

  Book I of The Republic has four parts. Plato doesn't name them, but we may call them the Cephalus, the Polemarchus, the build-up of Thrasymachus, and the critique of Thrasymachus. Let us take them one at a time.  I. The Cephalus. Cephalus is an old and wealthy man, who owns the home in which the disputants have gathered. He and Socrates have a brief and courteous conversation, which establishes that there are consolations of old age. One of these is that the passions (the desire for sex, for example) die down and allow reason to govern one’s actions unchallenged. That is an important foreshadowing of later elements in the book. Cephalus and Socrates briefly discuss the issue of what is justice. But the old man doesn’t want to get too deeply into the question and says goodbye. II. The Polemarchus . Polemarchus is Cephalus’ son and heir, and Socrates says only half-jokingly that he may have inherited his father’s part in this discussion. Asked what it is to be just: Polemarch...

  You may have heard Sam Altman on a news broadcast last weekend. Of course, you may not.  There was a lot else going on: two wars, with potentially important developments in each, as well as a guilty plea from the founder of Binance, launch of a spy satellite by the always-popular North Korean regime, and so forth and so on.  Amidst all of this, the board of directors of a company founded by Sam Altman to research artificial intelligence in a publicly transparent way, aptly called OpenAI, fired Altman. And they did so for no very clearly stated reason. Altman, though, went to Microsoft for assistance. Microsoft offered him a job heading its own AI push, and most of the employees of Altman's old company, OpenAI, threatened to quit if the board didn't persuade their old boss to come back. The implication was that they felt confident enough to quit because the new expanded MS operation headed by their old boss would happily take them on.    Altman may have the min...

song called "One Tin Soldier," performed by various artists and harmonically close kin to Pachelbel's Canon, was very big in North America in the early 1970s.  I remember thinking it was incredibly stupid, and making myself obnoxious on this subject to a couple of the song's admirers. [If you happen to read this -- sorry guys.] Upon reflection, I don't know why it struck me that way. But, for the record, it was the soundtrack version, from Billy Jack, that especially annoyed me.  Anyway, just for old time's sake and to make up for a hasty judgment of my callow youth, here is the refrain: Go ahead and hate your neighbor/ Go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven/You can justify it in the end There won't be any trumpets blowing/ Come the judgment day On the bloody morning after one/ tin soldier rides away. 

  God bless you" is a polite response to a sneeze in the American English vernacular.  May "God bless antihistamines," then, by the same token as he blesses sneezers. I would love to know a little of the history behind the biochemical marvel of antihistamines.  Yes, I went to the wikipedia article on the subject but don't understand it.  Thank you!

  "As I thought more about the giant volcano of crypto bullshit erupting at Crypto Bahamas, I realized that Tether was its molten core. Each scheme depended on exchanges like FTX to enable investors to buy and sell their tokens. And those exchanges in turn counted on Tether as a crucial connection to real US dollars. Without Tether, it was possible this entire economy would never have developed."   Zeke Faux, NUMBER GO UP, p. 135. Well, perhaps that is an overstatement.  Someone else would have come up with something similar had the founders of Tether -- Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars -- all been busy on quite different paths. Somebody would have created coins that stayed close in value to the US dollar, while otherwise bearing the technological features of the cryptos, otherwise very volatile against the dollar.  Still: Faux's book is largely a tale of how the Tether coin was built on a lie -- that there was a one-to-one relationship between ev...

 CQS is a London based investment concern founded in 1999 by Michael Hintze. He is also known as Lord  Hintze, and as of this writing he remains CQS' chairman of the board.  Hintze --pictured here -- also runs a hedge fund, which has been something of a side gig for him. It is called the Directional Opportunities Fund.  As it happens, Toronto, Canada based giant Manulife Investment Management is buying out CQS, in a deal set to close early next year.  Lord Hintze seems poised, and happy, to go his own way. In a statement, he said:  “I’m delighted that CQS has found the right partner in Manulife Investment Management. It provides a long-term platform that will enable CQS to thrive as a leading alternative credit manager for years to come under Soraya’s exceptionally able leadership. I will now focus full-time on running the Directional Opportunities Fund, an opportunity that I am excited about. I wish Soraya and the CQS team every success as they embark on t...

I mentioned "effective altruism" in one of my posts about Michael Lewis. I'm going to circle back on that now.  What the heck is it?  In essence, it is a theory that has branched off of the strict utilitarianism, of Peter Singer, under the slogan (not Singer's) of "earn to give."   The idea: people with the skill to take very high earning jobs, (to run hedge funds) and who have utilitarian convictions, should take those jobs. They would waste their efforts and utilitarian convictions caring for the ill or digging water wells in parts of the underdeveloped world.  No: they should do the Wall Street wheeling and dealing, earn lots of money, and then use it altruistically. They can PAY people to dig water wells.     Further: effective altruism (EA) has tended to take a very long-term view of things. The utility of people who won't be born for another 500 years is as important as that of people alive today. This argument is key to the work of William ...

  As a fitting remembrance of the late Matthew Perry,  the fellow who brought Chandler Bing to life, allow me to reflect in academic form on a contradiction at the heart of the FRIENDS' theme song.  The first line of the first verse: No one ever told you life was gonna be this way seems in pretty direct conflict with the fifth line of the third verse: Your mother told you there'd be days like these.  The predicate of the two sentences is identical: "to tell."  The subject affirmed by the latter would seem pretty clearly to be included in the subject denied in the former. That is: Mom is somebody. And, considering the object case, life is a succession of days. Perhaps some philosopher could defend the song from the charge that there is a DIRECT contradiction in the lyrics by contending that the object case in the former sentence seems to refer to a more pervasive condition of "life" than simply that it contains "days like these."  But is it possible...

  Just a stray thought.  Of what company is "the scum" a CEO? Some of the following might get a bit complicated. Hold on for the ride.  I call Vivek Ramaswamy "the scum" because of his memorable exchange with Nikki Haley. He said she should keep her daughter off TikTok.  She said he should keep her daughter "out of your voice," sounding a bit like Will Smith to Chris Rock. He returned to his trollish ways and she muttered "you're just scum".  So he has a moniker for the ages. It looked like he was lucky she didn't ChrisRock his world.  Still, that exchange is not my stray thought for today.  I am wondering about the several times he said he would be a great President because he is a CEO.  The Republicans DID have a successful CEO as a candidate for President not long ago. His name was Mitt Romney. His party is rather on the outs with him now.  The scum was never the CEO of a Bain Capital.  He was the CEO of Roivant Sciences, a Bermuda in...

  One idea now making the rounds among some policy wonks is this: we can improve the social security system by changing the way adjustments to payments are made.  SS recipients now typically get a cost of living allowance (COLA) to keep their payments at a constant level of spending power. Something like that is a very appealing idea in a system where inflation is more a feature of the system than a bug in it.   But ... I'm sure I heard one of the contenders in the latest Republican Presidential debate saying. "We ought to link Social Security payments NOT to COLA, but to inflation.  That would save some money and help preserve the system."   In fact I think this was one of the relatively sane Republicans: Christie? Haley?  The proposition is NOT self-defeating in any obvious way.  COLA is not the only possible index of inflation, after all.  One could measure inflation literally, by the expansion of the money supply.  (Although the...

 Bryan Leiter discusses how and why academic philosophers should try to persuade their undergrad students -- in most cases -- against pursuing the field of philosophy into grad school. Turn back and seek the safety of the shore! Actually, in a recent posting Leiter simply reminded us of a discussion in the subject that appeared on his blog ten years ago. But I followed him back there.   Here is the 2023 reminder:  Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Blast from the past: How to dissuade students from pursuing graduate work in philosophy (typepad.com) Here is the 2013 discussion:  Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: How to dissuade students from pursuing graduate work in philosophy? (typepad.com)

  No, "Wonder Woman" is NOT about to win a war with a magic lasso.  Fact Check: Has Gal Gadot Joined Israeli Army To Fight Hamas? (newsweek.com) . And, as Boomers know, the real Wonder Woman will always be ... Lynda Carter.  Maybe the IDF should try to recruit? 

 We've been hearing for years that the average age of much of the world -- essentially, the whole developed world -- is increasing.  The usual phrase is that the world is "graying."  A report from the US Census, after it had absorbed the 2020 census figures, made a century-by-century comparison of the amount of gray in the population. In 1920, only about 1 in 20 of the people in the US were 65 or older. In 2020, that figure had risen to one in six.  But one doesn't have to see the change in such a long time frame to see it clearly. The largest ever 10 year numeric gain in the 'senior' portion of the population defined by that age is the gain between 2010 and 2020. That category gains 15.5 million people that decade. One could make similar observations about much of the rest of the world.  There are various inferences one can draw from such facts. One, very much discussed, is that old-age pension systems are coming under stress. This has led to some heated deba...

I now take another look, perhaps our last look, at Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Once again, I will focus on a specific passage.  This time, that passage arises in the book's chapter six. In the ongoing story, it occurs when SBF is finally creating a crypto exchange, in Hong Kong in the go-go climate of early 2019.  [It didn't move much of its operation o the Bahamas until September 2020.] Lewis is talking about the difference between the crypto religionists on the one hand and the "suits" from traditional financial institutions, coming into crypto as colonizers, on the other.  The higher crypto prices rose, the greater the flood into crypto of sober-minded people in suits that people like Zane [a religionist] found insufferable. ... The Goldman guys and the venture capitalists and  the corporate lawyers turned crypto bros -- they were all part of this invasion of conventional people who wanted to make fast money without the kookiness that had made ...

Here is another fascinating passage from Lewis' book, GOING INFINITE. In this passage, chapter five, Lewis is telling his story through the eyes of Caroline Ellison. For those of you new to the subject: Ellison was Samuel Bankman-Fried's sort-of love interest, and at this point in our story she had joined his project to create a crypto oriented hedge fund.  (This project evolved into the FTX exchange and an affiliated hedge fund, but we aren't there yet.)  One more preliminary note: an "EA" is an "effective altruist," a member of a group of usually quite bright people committed to a very long-range sort of utilitarianism which produces some counter-intuitive results. We don't need to get further into it than that.   Anyway, the passage: " In late March [2018] she started the job. The situation inside Alameda Research wasn't anything like Sam had led her to expect. He'd recruited twenty or so EAs, most of them in their twenties, all but o...

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been looking forward to the receipt of Michael Lewis's latest book, on cryptocurrency and the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried. This will be the first in a series of three posts that will discuss passages in the book that stand out for me. None of these posts will constitute a review of the book, nor will they add up to one,  I now have it in my hot little hands. With some synchronicity, SBF took the stand in a courtroom on Thursday, Oct. 26, on his own behalf as a criminal defendant. This already tells you that the trial had not been going his way: defense counsel would have gone to a great deal of trouble to keep him OFF the stand were it not time for a desperate Hail Mary sort of play. But today's task is to quote a passage in the Lewis book about him that stands out. And here is one, from chapter three. Lewis gives an example of what is known in finance as "market making." Market making is not the same as "running an exchang...