Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Near the southern border of the western Massachusetts town of Longmeadow, near where it borders Connecticut, one finds a very fine and not-at-all expensive Greek restaurant named Grapevine.  Now, suppose you are in downtown Chicopee, somewhere in the neighborhood of John's Pizzeria [nowhere near as classy a place, to be honest] and you want to get to the Grapevine. What is the easiest way to do that?  You'll be starting off near 391. Get onto that highway and continue (westbound) for about 2 miles until you can get onto I-91 (southbound).   You'll then take 91 for about 7 minutes, if the traffic allows, and then get off exit 1, the last exit before you find yourself in (gasp) Connecticut. This exit will dump you onto route 5, and you stay on there, still southbound, until you find Maple Street.  This entails going past a lot of places familiar to anyone who loves Hollywood movies that involve small towns -- a small library with that Carnegie-ish look, a t...

The use of the words "risk" and "uncertainty" in vernacular English leaves the relationship between the words imprecise. That is, if I were to ask you, dear reader, what is the difference between risk and uncertainty, there would be no univocal "right" answer, though the words clearly are not synonyms. In general, we think of risk as a less-than-certain loss, so uncertainty figures into it, but uncertainty figures into a lot of other words too (such as "hope," which we think of as a less-than-certain gain). In finance, and in other areas as well, there has been some movement toward using the two words in a rigorously paired way, such that, to borrow a formulation from the George W. administration, "risk" represents the known unknowns of a situation, "uncertainty" represents the unknown unknowns. Here's a straightforward example: I know that a certain stock is interest-rate sensitive. I know that the Federal Reserv...

If all is going well, then on this day I am traveling to Chicago. I'll stay there until well into Sunday and I'll have neither the time nor the inclination to do a lot of blogging. Thus, these four posts have been prepared well in advance in order to clear that time up and will not comment on current events. [E'en if it mean missin' out of hearin' ye scallywags try to talk like a pirate in me comments section. Arrrrgh.] I had to get that out of my system for another year. In order to mark this as the start of that block, I will simply quote John Steinbeck: " A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."