Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Streetwise Professor, the blogging persona of Craig Pirrong, recently jumped into the fray regarding  high frequency trading. Find his comments here. Unless you've been following the HFT debates carefully already, the opening grafs there might put you off. Pirrong is positioning himself relative to a range of other commenters, Stiglitz, Salmon, DeLong especially. I'll cut to the chase for you. One of the issues created by the existence of HFT --and by the related fact that it is impossible for everybody to be equally fast or equally sophisticated in their algorithms, so there is an arm's race and a have/havenot split -- one of the issues is whether this circumstance discourages the gathering of information. Joe Trader might well believe in making decisions the old-fashioned way -- studying up on the corporation issuing certain stocks and bonds, looking at such factors as the competitive pressure in that corporation's product lines, considering the ratio of boo...

According to a new calculation by Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon, life must have pre-existed the planet Earth. You can find the study here .  You can find some of my own earlier uncredentialed speculations about related matters here. Sharov and Gordon are both properly credentialed. Each is a Ph.D. with a research role with prestigious (though non-academic) institutions. Nonetheless, there is a good deal of speculation in their work, as one might imagine given the subject. The gist is that they infer that genetic complexity increased at an exponential pace: it doubles every 376 million years.  If that is right, then life originated roughly 9.7 billion years ago (give or take 2.5 billion). And if that is right then it could not have originated on earth. Radiometric dating puts the age of the earth at roughly 4.5 billion years. So on their guesstimations, life must have been already 5 billion years old before the earth was formed. Their calculations als...