Felix Salmon, in Wired:

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart.

As Li himself said of his own model: "The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

Recently:

Smithers: That's quite a nice model, sir.

Burns: Model?

From last year:

The problem is not the ignorance. The problem is the bliss.

From 2004, Paul Graham:

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it.

From 1998, Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

What's in a name, Tim?

Nickipedia is a very simple, large API (and perhaps website) that provides a brute-force way of name standardization, by building a large database of known nicknames and misspellings and providing a search function on top of it. People could also contribute their own lists of nicknames and query against that list as well.

Nickipedia - Sunlabs wiki

Jeffrey Sachs:

Most important, we should stop panicking.

From 2004:

We'll see skyrocketing tax rates, drastically lower retirement and health benefits, high inflation, a rapidly depreciating dollar, unemployment, and political instability.

But don't panic.

From last November:

Fear not!

We'll show you how to endure the forthcoming recession with a bit of grit, some nous and the wise advice of our post-war forebears. Let's begin with a celebration of the true heroine of austerity Britain: the housewife.

From 1929:

The Country is Fundamentally Sound; 'Don't Panic, Stocks are Safe!'

From last year, or 1929:

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

The Economic Need for Stable Policies, Not a Stimulus

Here's an acid test: if your project would cease to exist tomorrow, would you work on the feature you're contemplating doing today?

Time can buy you the luxury of strategic objectives, but remember that today is no different than the day you’ll be taking the last pebble out of that jar, it just happens to be a few days into the future.

From the archive:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Make time:

After the salted yak butter tea had been served, the chief continued: "If you want to thrive in Baltistan, you must respect our ways. The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die. Mr. Greg, you must make time to share three cups of tea."

Fighting Technological Indulgences

Neil Postman:

It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and it is a delusion to believe that the technological changes of our era have rendered irrelevant the wisdom of the ages and the sages.

Nonetheless, having said this, I know perfectly well that because we do live in a technological age, we have some special problems that Jesus, Hillel, Socrates, and Micah did not and could not speak of. I do not have the wisdom to say what we ought to do about such problems, and so my contribution must confine itself to some things we need to know in order to address the problems. I call my talk Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change. I base these ideas on my thirty years of studying the history of technological change but I do not think these are academic or esoteric ideas. They are to the sort of things everyone who is concerned with cultural stability and balance should know and I offer them to you in the hope that you will find them useful in thinking about the effects of technology on religious faith.

Richard Hamming:

I finally adopted what I called "Great Thoughts Time." When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: "What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?", "How will computers change science?" I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Dave Brinks, at Exquisite Corpse:

beginning at the end you come to a place where sound travels through rock the aperture is porphyry plucked violins spur of the valley the epiphany of pythia an outcrop of ridges orpheus ascending still nothing is known of the occipital text which brought him here afire and aglow but to be born out of silence all the dimensions the square flat ones euclidean space is optional when climbing the sky look at the duration of two circles conjoined at the hip caduceus shedding its skin moments of involuntary bliss and what sense lay bare

Molly Young:

Desserts cut into wedges are more delicious than those cut into squares or slivers.

The Geometry of Sound

Kevin Kelly:

There is a cost to run this machine, a cost we are only beginning to reckon with, but so far the gains from this ever enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Louis Menand:

Television was the Cold War intellectuals’ nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.

The Unabomber Was Right

The Golden Grid is a web grid system. It's a product of the search for the perfect modern grid system.

The Golden Grid

Barry Werth's new book earns a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

In this fascinating study, Werth shows how the idea of social Darwinism, as codified by Herbert Spencer, took hold in the United States, underpinning the philosophy of the Gilded Age's social, cultural and financial elite.

Anchoring his story with the stunning Delmonico's celebration honoring the departure of Spencer after a triumphant tour of the United States in 1882, Werth rightly depicts the frame of reference Spencer left behind as a predecessor to Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, with its focus on unrestrained self-interest and unbridled capitalism.

As Werth explains, Spencer's interpretation of Darwinism won the approval of not only robber barons but also prominent religious, scientific and political leaders. Henry Ward Beecher, writes Werth, used the most acclaimed pulpit in America to preach the gospel of evolution; that is, that it was God's way to... sort the worthy from the wretched.

This was survival of the fittest, which Spencer and his followers saw as not only just but necessary. Thus, Werth elegantly reveals a firm philosophical foundation for all the antilabor excesses of the Industrial Age.

From The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand:

If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

On ephemera:

Let's start with an assumption:

"Everything we post online is ephemeral."

Now, if we start with that assumption, how does that change our approach to what we put online?

To me, there are two likely reactions:

(a) post more! It doesn't matter how verbose you are, little of what you say will last very long

(b) post less! There's no point clogging up the net with ephemera; only post that which is essential; keep your ephemera to yourself

I've been wondering about it all. I've been thinking that perhaps I should make paper-based outputs of anything that I want to really last. By all means clog up the net with everything else in the meantime, but don't form any attachment to it. Don't depend on it being there.

Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

From last year:

Any technology that is going to have significant impact over the next 10 years is already at least 10 years old.

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Already lost