Control or Chaos, Being There Too
Cause and Effect
The previous essay highlighted grandmaster chess competition against powerful chess computers as a case study in objective problem solving. It also highlighted the movie Being There as a satirical story about the subjective nature of economic central planning. However, the metaphor goes even deeper.
As movie critic Roger Ebert told it in about the day in 1997 when Garry Kasparov was lost to Deep Blue, “I found myself thinking of the film “Being There” (1979). The chess champion said there was something about the computer he did not understand, and it frightened him. There were moments when the computer seemed to be . . . thinking.” What Kasparov understood was that “the pattern matching part of the brain has rung a bell to attract our attention to something interesting.”
Twenty-five years later, we began to realize the power of augmented intelligence in our everyday lives on a mass market basis. But, of what should the world champion have been afraid? As it turns out, the team programming Deep Blue was able to change the instructions for its machine between games – and sometimes intra game.
In that scenario, it was impossible for Kasparov to identify the patterns and tendencies of a machine opponent programmed for one purpose – to beat him. His talent may have been neutralized by seemingly arbitrary changes to cause and effect.
And it is that of which we should all be afraid. What happens when an entire culture becomes programmed by State education to ignore the laws of identity and causality? As Ebert describes the lead character named Chance, “His mind has been supplied with a fund of simplistic generalizations about the world, phrased in terms of the garden where he has worked all his adult life. He is able to respond to given cues, and can, within limits, adapt and learn.”
In today’s socioeconomic jargon, some the catch phrases that no one questions are equilibrium, antitrust, stakeholders, living wage, stimulus and fairness. Yet, the value of those terms lies only in their ambiguity. And for individual investors, their internal contradictions become conservative projections, superior managers, blended benchmarks, social responsibility, sector overweights and tactical rebalancing.
How does this happen? Ebert explains, “Because he is WASP, middle-aged, well-groomed, dressed in tailored suits, and speaks like an educated man, he is automatically presumed to be a person of substance.” He is not – and the objective investor knows it.
The rational alternative is to respect the virtues of money, information of prices, elegance of markets and justice of earned profits. And for the true intellectual, the nature of risk, the primacy of time and the absolute of reason for the creation of values. To learn more, please click the link below.
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Method-Middle-Class-Manifesto-Objective/dp/1696009111/