“Dear Ambassador, we are concerned that you are perhaps over-focused on human rights to the detriment of commercial interests.”
Reminds me of this:
I don’t know how true the first bit is (truth isn’t a digital on/off thing, or, at least, I doubt the truth here is). But, it strikes me, it’s worthy of news and/or investigation.
Erm, are we the baddies?
(Note: I was looking for an image for the post of ‘good guys’ wearing skulls and found this post on Pharyngula saying exactly the same thing but about a different source of disquiet. Once again, comedy works well as a meme-vector.)
Mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms are operating every minute of every day in the nation’s stock exchanges.
. . .
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.
It’s thanks to Nanex, the data services firm, that we know what their handiwork looks like at all. In the aftermath of the May 6 “flash crash,” which saw the Dow plunge nearly 1,000 points in just a few minutes, the company spent weeks digging into their market recordings, replaying the day’s trades and trying to understand what happened. Most stock charts show, at best, detail down to the one-minute scale, but Nanex’s data shows much finer slices of time. The company’s software engineer Jeffrey Donovan stared and stared at the data. He began to think that he could see odd patterns emerge from the numbers. He had a hunch that if he plotted the action around a stock sequentially at the millisecond range, he’d find something. When he tried it, he was blown away by the pattern. He called it “The Knife.” This is what he saw:
Filippo then issued a challenge, saying that the commission to build the dome should be given to the man who could make an egg stand on end, as that man would have the skills required for the job. After the various architects tried in vain to accomplish it, Filippo took an egg, whacked it on its end and then placed it on the table where it stood upright and did not fall over.
The other architects protested that they could have done that, too, to which Filippo replied that they could have built the dome, too, had they seen his model. Impressed, the judges awarded Filippo the commission to construct the dome.
Let me next define the “Adjacent Possible.” Take a liter flask with 1,000 types of chemicals. Call these “The Actual.” Let them react by a single reaction step. Perhaps new species of chemicals appear. Call these the “Adjacent Possible.”
Now I point to the Adjacent Possible of the evolving biosphere. Once there were lung fish, swim bladders were in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. Two billion years ago, before there were multi-celled organisms, swim bladders were not in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere.
If we agree, then watch! We do not know what is in the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere! We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!
Then can we make probability statements about the evolution of the biosphere? No. Consider flipping a coin 10,000 times. It will come up heads about 5,000 times with a binomial distribution. But, critically, note that we knew beforehand all the possible outcomes, all heads, all tails, all 2 to the 10,000 possibilities. Thus we knew what statisticians call “the sample space” of the process, so could construct a probability measure.
Can we construct a probability measure for the evolution of the biosphere into its Adjacent Possible? No. We do not know the sample space!
Part of the issue with copyright and patents seems to be that we’re not sure if people have gone from A – Z (which is worthy of reward) or started off from N (which probably isn’t):
“Q: How can companies become more adaptive?
A: You need to be able to recognise your adjacent possibilities. A lot of people can’t. They are at A, they want to go to X. And X is maybe twenty steps away. And they can?t visualise what the next step is that gets them towards X. They can work their way backwards to like N. But they have no idea how to get from A to N. They do know if they can get to N, they can get to X. But they need to know what B and C are. I find that a lot of people at a lot of companies are so focused on being able to articulate X, and then they hire consultants who work them backwards to N, that they never figure out B and C.”
