jaywalker

turn (Kiwi, 'shout')

cauliflower

???? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > @#$%& me guys - it is self-idnulegeunt pseuds > corner on here with you two. You really are > confusing speaking an over complicated flowery > academic language with knowledge and insight. > Ironically there's a whole sociology on coded > language (read it) .....a lot of hot air. You are > both not suggesting much confidence in your > ideas/hypothesis if you can't or are not willing > to express them in a more accessible language - > it's translatable but tedious as is. Have you no > confidence in the merits of your arguments to > express them clearly rather than in academic > bullshit? ok, so you want me to read and respond to something - let me know what it is. Otherwise, you are authorising your views in a way that cannot be gainsaid.

JohnL Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Rumour is she's after the Supreme Court now > > Human rights- transfer to Supreme Court as now > then > make sure she can appoint members of the Supreme > Court. > Why should she even need law experts there ;) did you see the brilliant Short Cuts section in the London Review of Books this week? Andrew O'Hagan on the absolute poverty of the government case in the Supreme Court: and its sinister claims.

Seabag Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It's all got a bit boring up there. I'm sure > there's merit to all the wordiness, only it's near > impossible not to glaze over whilst reading. And I > like business/models/analysis very much. > > But this Independent article is manageable > > This is the year that Britain will allow working > families to slide into poverty - The Independent > https://apple.news/AAWMtDbGdRTiNrMv83GADOw There are probably only two possibilities then. One gets this all the time. You expect ordinary language to be able to cope with any issue. But then you go to the doctor to understand your complaint and look at the file and it is written in gibberish (to you). Opposed to this, priests (in secular form) constantly up the ante on esoteric language to further their prestige (bien sur). So it is undecidable, isn't it? Unless you form a view about the specialism. When I wrote that "models (from, say, the point of view of logic or rational interest) cannot be correct if they are not taken to be correct - in a strong sense rational expectations then fails because the social is bootstrapped by definitional processes that are contingent on all sorts of things, rarely calculated or rational ones, and these cannot be anticipated" does that sound like theology or reason?

Gosh, this is taking me back (over 35 years to when I decided to give up economics so forgive me if I get the details wrong :-) ) - we were talking at cross purposes because I read the Friedman critique as a refutation of the Phillips Curve (although that still haunts the political imagination as in the current idea that a return to fiscal expansion in the USA will cause real effects even though capital is highly mobile and exchange rates are floating). Moving on, in terms of expectations, you have got to be joking :-). Friedman's model tacitly incorporates rational expectations as a limit (the vertical curve once you get positive feedback between expectations and policy) but of course relied on adaptive expectations in the mechanism of the model itself. This seems to me to be very sensible. The Lucas (or as I remember it, also Barro) approach is also very interesting - and I get the as it were bottom up and distributed 'island' idea you said you were working on with more recent AI components (one that could be exploited in many other arenas of social research). However, sticking with more 'macro' theory: the experience of the 1980s was that RELATIVELY sticky prices in a floating exchange rate world with perfect capital mobility INCLUDING an assumption of rational expectations undoes Monetarism (Dornbusch). We saw that writ large with Thatcher. Since then the orthodoxy (not politically very palatable) has been that only tiny interest rate movements are safe (and fiscal policy is impotent). The great intellectual merit of the (Muth)-rational expectations assumption was that it sutured the model to include that model (where correct and taken to be correct) in the modelling of the actions of agents in the model. This must be right (although, again, this is not instant and might be quite poorly adapted to). But if the model is not correct it might still be taken to be correct. Also, correct models (from, say, the point of view of logic or rational interest) cannot be correct if they are not taken to be correct - in a strong sense rational expectations then fails because the social is bootstrapped by definitional processes that are contingent on all sorts of things, rarely calculated or rational ones, and these cannot be anticipated. Economics is therefore a doomed enterprise.

why do children adopt comfort blankets or toys? but of course in some cases it might be simply a question of modesty :-) and you have not related this (acute) observation to the multitude of pets on laps - as if a synecdoche for 'I am a caring person' given that I cannot stroke (at least in this private space made public for money or fame) my partner/sibling/parent or whoever. it cannot be a straightforward thing to have to perform a reaction to TV.

HiLordship, I think you misread my post: 1. jaywalker Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > "Historical data is always imperfect, but it is > the only measure without bias that we have to > measure risk and make hypotheses about the > future". > > ok, clearly at one level this is very sensible. > Yet I am troubled in a number of ways. > > Historical data is always-already selected: the > principles of selection bias the notion of > 'history' they then present. I think this is > orthodoxy in the academy (at which point I get > ridiculed, but there it is). You could have heard > your words out of the mouth of Barber in 1971 - he > had not read (or at least understood) Friedman's > critique of the Phillips Curve. Since 2011, both unemployment and inflation have fallen, with little sign of the inverse relationship associated with the Phillips Curve. The Philips Curve's usefulness has receded already as it became altogether incapable of producing the pattern of inflation and unemployment we see during the first five years of the recovery from the recent recession. What we see during the past few years is persistently high unemployment combined with low and stable inflation expectations and a falling observed rate of inflation. The Philip's Curve has to be put back in the tool box for now and not used until there is a significant change in circumstances. But that is what I said? The Phillips curve was destroyed by Friedman (1967 or 1968 I don't have it to hand) well before its empirical collapse. 2 > My guess is that measuring risk is really only a > projection of the status quo. If we have calm-ish > weather and know the time of year then we can > posit a distribution. But for the interesting > risks we can't. There is, simply, no underlying > distribution to posit. This is because complexity > operates BOTH in the unknown of the initial > conditions AND because the non-linear feedback > loops characteristic of the mythologised 'the > economy' (and I do mean that this is a myth) > themselves are both poorly modelled AND CHANGE, at > times chaotically. We have seen such phase shifts > this year. The modelling effort really only homes > in on precision when times are not a changing. You misunderstand the application of modelling uncertainties, particularly 'known' uncertainties. These can be given discrete interpolated values using custom techniques. By running these models dynamically over time we can get a pattern of outcomes that can help us further narrow their results. I mainly use these for micro scenarios - what if, what not to do, when to do, when to stop, when to go, how much, when to hedge, what to hedge - all for particular narrow scenarios and we can have quite a success rate using these techniques. I'm sure the BoE have far more sophisticated ABM/MAS models doing the same every day. Of course. But I said that the interesting uncertainties are the unknown ones. The problem is (shifting into my own academic specialism) that humans define their situations contingently (Kitsuse). These are in non-linear feedback relation to the definitions of others. No amount of modelling of 'known' uncertainties can cope with this (for example, the failure of polling organisations in the general election, brexit and the USA election).

came across this tonight - very entertaining. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38440946

"Historical data is always imperfect, but it is the only measure without bias that we have to measure risk and make hypotheses about the future". ok, clearly at one level this is very sensible. Yet I am troubled in a number of ways. Historical data is always-already selected: the principles of selection bias the notion of 'history' they then present. I think this is orthodoxy in the academy (at which point I get ridiculed, but there it is). You could have heard your words out of the mouth of Barber in 1971 - he had not read (or at least understood) Friedman's critique of the Phillips Curve. My guess is that measuring risk is really only a projection of the status quo. If we have calm-ish weather and know the time of year then we can posit a distribution. But for the interesting risks we can't. There is, simply, no underlying distribution to posit. This is because complexity operates BOTH in the unknown of the initial conditions AND because the non-linear feedback loops characteristic of the mythologised 'the economy' (and I do mean that this is a myth) themselves are both poorly modelled AND CHANGE, at times chaotically. We have seen such phase shifts this year. The modelling effort really only homes in on precision when times are not a changing.

bicycle

I don't think that is a tautology. Perhaps the first glimmer that sense is generated (and blinds) in the location of its action (not in some other realm of ideas). Rome versus Athens for sure.

Seneca had some fundamental insights: Loco non tui si non ubi es.

realism

also, I do think we should judge people on their utopian imagination not on their (constrained-to-be-a-child-of-their-time) acts

hmm, I think i'd have preferred Seneca to Nero as my Emperor, at least on the basis of his public pronouncements (writings) (I accept the bar is not very high) and he was of course (disgracefully) willing to fawn to Nero in terms of speech-writing etc (one does wonder who the speech-writers are for some of our current masters). He may or may not have been involved in a plot (the book I read recently suggested he was desperately trying to retire given what Nero had become but Nero thought him safer inside his circle): but it is understandable if he was. As for computing uncertainties, I'm not sure you can. But my technical knowledge in this area has a datestamp of c 1983 (Buiter). After that I turned to other things. I guess I would worry about the economist's notion of contingency: what we understand of the past shifts in ways I suspect AI cannot accommodate. But that is a deep question for sure.

adolescent

of course probably not legally murder: the soldiers were the drones of their day representing absolute rule.

yes it was quite a test of his philosophy: I seem to remember he tried several methods before succumbing - still murder though, just allowed to choose his own self-directed method of dispatch.

Yes, your point that "there are boundaries of reality & opposing influences that will reduce the Trump effect" must be the expected outcome. However, there are some factors that increase the variance: Trump's addiction to social media, direct popular appeal, and, more significantly for me, his personality - a kind of polar opposite to the very lovable Reagan (not my taste but nonetheless). For some reason I keep thinking of Seneca's murder by officers of state sent by Nero: the kind of thing you order when your fantasies cannot be realised and you realise your grip on power is unravelling. Reagan was a fundamentally decent if na?ve man... Fat tails: # it might be that the Supreme Court just allows brexit on May's timetable. But there is also a possibility that they will - in practical terms - block it entirely. # Russia. # French elections (these still look deeply troubling) # pensions crisis (really this is a crisis!) # stagflation. And of course unknown unknowns.

Titch, how is the absence of snowflakes not political? it is one of the most contested and polarising issues we face other than those you tried to head off in your OP. OK i accept I had a sense of irony failure; but raw nerves and all that. i do think a defining characteristic of this terrible year has been the outbreak of a kind of civil war. families are riven by brexit (i heard much about this around the table at xmas lunch) and it is particularly unsettling that this is very often inter-generational and regional. in particular, young voters feel (in my view with good reason) BOTH betrayed by the vote AND financially repressed by the older generations that voted to leave. And this is quite apart from the damage we have done to the good workers of Europe on whose labour we depend. The lack of leadership in the Labour party on this issue will destroy them. There has also been a marked slip in what seems to be tolerated in the media: some highly unpleasant contributions to Question Time and a quite appalling lack of moderation on the BBC have your say website. The ED forum is all sweetness and light in comparison. Although part of our vibrant EDF forum culture, unclegen's characterisation of those who were against Brexit (including those like me on strongly interventionist wing economically (what was the EU for other than to redistribute wealth to deprived areas, and allow people facing very low wages to come to the UK and (justly) earn much higher ones?) and strongly hands-off in terms of civil liberties (guaranteed by the ECJ and ECHR in the face of an increasingly heteronomous UK justice system) seems to me to be completely misplaced. I do not think the severe emotional response I felt to the Brexit vote was childish, or an expression of personal interest: rather I think it encompassed a sober reflection of what the vote means for the future direction of UK politics and the well-being of all those who live here. Not to mention what the vote might seem to legitimise in forthcoming elections in Holland and France and the perception of Russia that the EU is already falling apart.

This is a very savvy post, Lordship. I think about a mean estimate. Fat tails on the distribution suggest to me 0.90 for pound/euro Q3 (Dornbusch overshooting hypothesis). For cable, much more difficult because Trump himself an outlier.

pus

oh you really do want to position your respondents as grumpy old men and women. well i'm up for that: - that the prison population continues to rise, and prisoners that protest about their inhuman conditions are labelled rioters and threatened with even more severe penalties. - that the Justice Secretary seemed unwilling to perform her constitutional duty to uphold the autonomy of the Judiciary after the disgraceful Mail headline. - that I still cannot go into a shop and buy cannabis, something I want to do. - that the vast majority of my posts on this forum are said to be "rubbish". Truly, I do blame myself. - that I had not heard of and then read Cortazar's masterpiece Hopscotch until I was middle aged. - that I am still slave to my cat (le roi) - (a Cortazar theme.) So I feel for you Titch, I really do.

I have a candle burning in my sitting room because it is xmas. My smart device has just warned me the air quality has deteriorated significantly. I am having the walls and ceiling demolished as soon as we are over these atavistic bank holidays.