An Autonomous Agent

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Category: mathematics (Page 1 of 3)

Hidden Forces – Interview Series

Hidden Forces, hosted by Demetri Kofinas is an nice set of interviews with various people on topics including: finance, complexity, mathematics, and cryptocurrencies. I struggled listening to some of the interviewees because I did not agree with their ideas or conclusions; but I guess it is good to have conflicting opinions in order to encourage debate in the comments and to help review one’s own opinions and understandings. Regardless, Kofinas provides a highly accessible medium through which advanced ideas can be grasped.

I first ran across Hidden Forces while listening to the interview with Ray Monk about philosophical mathematics. Monk’s narration on the work of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, and Gödel is excellent – by far one of the clearest and easiest to grasp. It was learning about these paradigms and paradoxes of mathematics via Hofstadter’s famous book which led me to start this website.

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence – Benoit Mandelbrot

I’ve been wanting to read The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot for a number of years. Mandelbrot helped to change the way people view financial market dynamics. This book is definitely a must read for people working in the financial industry. However, Mandelbrot was not the first. It is a little surprising that Mandelbrot did not talk in detail about the work of R.N. Elliott or Robert Prechter, among others, which I think complement Mandelbrot’s work on financial fractals. Patrick Harris wrote a short paper discussing whether Mandelbrot should have cited Elliott (link to paper).

To me, the idea of infinite memory processes is one of the most important concepts touched on by Mandelbrot in this book. It suggests that economists and traders should be developing models and theories which value the importance of price series and data going back decades. And it makes sense to me that people and prices do not change their fundamental behavior over extended periods of technological evolution. However, I suspect that organisms do change their fundamental behavior if the time horizon is thousands or millions of years. I am very curious to read more about Hurst’s studies of the Nile.

Dangerous Knowledge – David Malone BBC

Dangerous Knowledge, by David Malone, summarizes the work and life of some of the greatest thinkers in late 19th and 20th centuries. Includes the work and life of Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel, and Turing.

Watch it here: Dangerous Knowledge

Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security: Volume 5 NATO Security through Science Series: Human and Societal Dynamics – T.C. Devezas

Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security: Volume 5 NATO Security through Science Series: Human and Societal Dynamics by T.C. Devezas is what I am currently reading.

Fascinating to say the least.

Also, see: A Spectral Analysis of World GDP Dynamics: Kondratieff Waves, Kuznets Swings, Juglar and Kitchin Cycles in Global Economic Development, and the 2008–2009 Economic Crisis Korotayev, Andrey V and Tsirel, Sergey V.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – Adam Curtis

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, by Adam Curtis, provides a grand overview of many of the people and ideas which have shaped the development of computers, systems, social theory, and politics over the past century. It is one of the better documentaries I have every seen and definitely worth watching; however, I agree with the reviewer John Preston who said it had an “…infuriating glibness too as the web of connectedness became ever more stretched. No one could dispute that Curtis has got a very big bite indeed. But what about the chewing, you ask. There wasn’t any – or nothing like enough of it to prevent a bad case of mental indigestion.”

Watch it:

Shush.se
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Vimeo
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

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