Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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...

 If you follow the link to which I will send you in a sec, and you scroll down there a bit, you will find near the start of the comments section a memory (from an anonymous source) of Karl Popper at a colloquium. Grunbaum and Popper – Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book (wordpress.com) I discovered it accidentally, but I treasure this story.   " As a student in Vienna in the early 1980s, I remember a small conference in honor of the 80th birthday of Popper. The great man was there himself, listening to papers of mostly students. One of the papers defended a sort of cultural conceptual incommensurability, to which Popper only had one brief reply: “Young man, I really want to thank you for your very learned paper. However, I gave seminars where there were people from Africa, the Middle-East, Australia, and South America, and we all understood each other perfectly well. So I don’t know where this incommensurability is supposed to come from.”  

So, then it finally stopped raining, Noah docked the ark, opened it up, and gave the animals a pep talk. They galloped or trotted or otherwise moved in their various ways on their merry ways.    Noah took a final tour of the now mostly abandoned boat. He heard sobbing sounds coming from a corner and found snakes over there.  Noah gave them his pep talk too, and told them it was their time and their duty, to go forth and multiply.  "That's why we're crying." Said a snake.  "We can't multiply.  We're adders." 

Country Garden, a Chinese property development company, has now defaulted on its bonds.  This is one of the manifestations of a sudden slow-down in China's property sector, one of the country's key sources of wealth creation. The total sales of China's largest 100 property developers were down 29% in September of this year from the same number in September 2022. [That year-on-year figure comes from the China Real Estate Information Corp., a private data provider.] Until a year ago, Country Garden was considered a model developer by the Chinese state authorities.  It was credit worthy in the eyes of state-owned banks and investment worthy in the eyes of those from whom it raised money on the Hong Kong exchange in late 2022. But between the beginning of 2023 and the default in mid-October, the HK listed shares had lost 72 percent of their value. Where is the property development sector in the country headed?  What impact will that have on China's macro picture?  These ...

  We had good news from the US Supreme Court recently. It summarily refused to hear a case that seems to have been brought to its attention solely for the purpose of obtaining a reversal of New York Times v. Sullivan.    A coal baron turned politician, Donald Blankenship, took exception to a printed characterization of himself as a felon. He had been convicted, and served time, for a misdemeanor, not a felony.  The characterization is an error, but there is no reason to believe that the error involved "actual malice" in the legal/constitutional sense, and there is no doubt that Blankenship is a public figure. As well as probably the second most blatantly fascistic "Donald" in US public life at the moment.  So, as to Blankenship's efforts to get a defamation trial underway: check mate, right? Well, so one would think. If one were not Blankenship himself, OR someone devoted to the destruction of the Times v. Sullivan rule that has protected publications from preci...

 I am 65 years old today -- officially a "senior."  BTW, I am not receiving social security. This isn't a defiant anarchistic gesture -- I simply am willing to wait the year and two-thirds for the full amount. Anyway, I am likely enjoying a wild time as you read this. Trying to wash down clam dip with wine or something. On the Kantian principle that a human mind and its phenomenal world are mutual creations: happy birthday, world!      Now let me get back for a moment to the Sam Bankman-Fried trial I mentioned last week.  Thinks aren't going well for SBF. Indeed, the picture emerging of his operation makes it all seem positively Madoffian. The Madoff of cryptocurrency : put that on a list of epitaphs no one wants.  That will be enough. Don't want to work too hard.  I have candles to blow out. 

  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/03/science/nobel-prize-physics.html.  A Nobel Prize was just awarded for the physics of attoseconds. This interests me because it represents an oft unmentioned frontier.  Let me back up a bit. It is natural to think of two opposed frontiers in physics -- the very very big and the very very small. Physicists of one sort, cosmologists, talk about the universe as a whole, how quickly it is expanding, whether there is a possibility the expansion will halt at some point and be followed by retraction, how much "dark matter" it may all contain, and so forth. The very big big picture. Physicists of another sort, particle physicists, talk about the very small, the fundamental particles. The ones we all learned about in elementary school as well a the more exotic creatures like muons.  THOSE are the frontiers of knowledge.  But, and here we arrive at the point, the attosecond work looks at a third frontier, that of really really fast even...

Early this month, as Donald Trump made a point of showing up, unnecessarily, for the first three days of his civil trial in Manhattan, and with the press treating it with all the fanfare they have treated his four criminal indictments, Sam Bankman-Fried also went on trial.  The SBF trial is criminal and it is very likely to put SBF in prison, perhaps for a very long time. Furthermore, since SBF was in his heyday, not TOO long ago, a billionaire whiz-kid at the very top of the cryptocurrency food chain, this trial in other circumstances would itself be a top-tier spectacle. At least as spectacular as would be the civil trial of a billionaire old-man in the middle of the reality-television food chain. SBF ran both a crypto exchange (with some bank-like characteristics)  and a hedge fund, known as FTX and as Alameda Research, respectively. I admit having written confused things about this in the recent past. In this very blog, I once referred to Alameda Research as FTX's "data-cr...

  My last post offered my reasons for believing that "peak Soviet" was on or about 1959. This offers an angle to a question: how do empires fall? How did that empire get from 1959 to 1991?  What did NOT happen was a simple diagonal line decline. What did happen was a decline that was slow ... then still slow ... then again slow ... but then very fast.  Several things happened in the decade 1959 - '69 that indicated the empire had reached a limit, but most of these developments did not seem at all like omens of impending collapse.  There was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Khrushchev did get something for his trouble: the US did through back channels agree to withdraw missiles from Turkey. But the whole thing looked like Nikita K. had pushed too hard and had been forced to back down: never a good look for an Emperor.  The year 1963 saw a very bad harvest in the grain-bearing parts of the country, resulting in breadlines, and in the face-losing decision to expen...

  In the long historical arc of the Soviet Union, from creation in 1917 to death in 1991, what was the peak? The high point of that arc? I'd like to suggest: 1959.  At this time, the Soviet Union was literally leading the human race into outer space, sending out its satellites and in time human beings and daring the other World Power to catch up. Also at that time, it acquired a new ally island-nation just 90 miles away from the United States -- indeed, 90 miles away from the metropolis of Miami. Further, to all appearances there was a great communistic concord between the Soviet Union of this moment and the Peoples' Republic of China. If, in 1959, you were one of the privileged elite in either Moscow or Peking/Beijing, you would have known that this concord was less than perfect, but you would surely have gone along with that facade. The break did not become an open one until years later. Soviet control over the eastern half of Europe was unquestioned -- indeed, it had confir...

There is an old story about novelist Henry James. I am a bit surprised I haven't mentioned it in this blog or its precursor before now.  The story is that Henry James was once speaking to his nephew, William James Jr., the philosopher's son. tete-a-tete, when "Billy" was a child, and told him there are three important rules in life. ... Be kind, be kind, and be kind.  ----------------------  This story is an example of the old "rule of three" One says something three times to make it memorable. Four or more times and one has simply made one's self a bore. What are the three most important considerations in real estate: location, location, and location!    A priest, a rabbi, and a minister go camping together. [You can include "and an atheist" in that joke, but it generally will involve dropping out one of the other three, keeping the number of campers constant.) The above story appears in Leon Edel's magisterial biography of Henry James, an...

The Cato Institute has presented its institutionally generated thoughts about cryptocurrencies and government regulation thereof, in podcast form.  The podcast is the work of  Jack Solowey and Jennifer Schulp. Solowey is the head of Cato's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. Schulp is the director of financial regulation studies within that Center.  The titular question: "Is Congress Tackling Tough Questions on Crypto Regulation?" The answer is almost certainly "no," because Congress of late isn't tackling anything of importance, especially given that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is traveling up the butt-hole of its own self-absorption. But is that really the answer that they're looking for? See for yourself.    Is Congress Tackling Tough Questions on Crypto Regulation? | Cato Institute  

I have referred you to "Existential Comics" before. Philosophy and jokes.   The Greatest Ambition of Philosophy - Existential Comics This time the "joke" involves Gregory Sadler, also known as "The philosophy guy on YouTube." He has just completed a massive project, ten years of half-hour YouTube videos both reading to us and explaining Hegel's most obscure work (that is a high bar), THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT. Here is a link to the final video of that series.    Half Hour Hegel: Phenomenology of Spirit (Absolute Knowing, 808) - YouTube Enjoy (I guess).  The comic is much more fun than the reading. But sample the latter, it may cure you of any desire to go into Hegel further.