I try to ensure that my speaking and writing are politically correct. Since my politics are completely different from those of most of the people I meet, it means that my usages are very different from those of 'PC'.
---
I like my dictionaries old-fashioned. They help to build plenty of inertia into my usage of words. They defend me against would-be populist linguists and usage pundits who practise shameless reverse snobbery against all notions of Received English.
My preferred dictionary is a 1972 edition of Chambers. In it my favourite definition, for its concentrated political incorrectness, is that for 'umiak':
> an open skin boat, manned by women [Eskimo]
A definition composed by someone who would have thought no-one crass enough to believe that the verb 'to man' cannot help but mean 'to crew with a man'.
In 1972 feminist linguistic superstition and revisionism played no part in Chambers' choice and ordering of definitions for 'man':
> a human being: mankind: a grown-up human male: ...
If the feminists had checked this definition they would have realized they had no excuse for forcing the bloated use of 'person' and 'he/she', etc. on us. (That would have made no difference to them, of course.)
---
I've heard Brian Micklethwait say recently that PC is often just a matter of politeness. Yes, it can be, Brian. It can also be a matter of insult. As when someone insults me by declaring that I'm guilty of insulting Eskimos by using the traditional English name for their people. The function of the exercise is not to defend the sensibilities of Eskimos but to insinuate a political view of the history of white–Eskimo relations. Fine: but nothing to do with politeness.
---
The Encarta World English Dictionary (1999) has a huge problem with 'man', of course. Since everyone's opinion is equally valuable, it has to proceed like this:
> 1. ADULT MALE HUMAN an adult male human being
Which of course is false for the minority who read a lot of literature more than 30 years old. Dictionaries should put the interests of this elite first.
> 2. PERSON a person, regardless of sex or age (often considered offensive)
> 3. PARTICULAR TYPE OF MAN ...
> 4. HUMAN RACE the human race in general (often considered offensive)
> 5. MODERN OR EARLIER HUMAN BEING (sometimes considered offensive)
...
And so on and so forth. The most amusing string of words generated by this formula is:
> be your own man to have the resources or confidence to be responsible for yourself or your actions (often considered offensive)
Encarta's usage note at 'person' includes these question-begging phrases:
> In combining forms: terms that are not gender-specific have increasingly grown in prominence ... [The only such term cited is '-person'.]
> ... the powerful trend towards inclusive terms ...
But the issue is whether '-man' (in 'fisherman', 'chairman') is really gender-specific. And the answer is: it's not if you don't mean it that way. Meanings belong to users.
So why shouldn't the ideologues say what they like? (After all, I'm an ideologue.)
They're allowed to. It's a free country. But it's a hell of a bad idea deliberately and tendentiously to render the language of the past alien and incomprehensible.
And here 'bad' can sometimes mean 'evil'.
---
On the same page of the Encarta dictionary as the 'person' usage note, I see the definition of a 'Personal Digital Assistant' (quaint capitals included):
> a small handheld computer with a built-in notebook, diary, and fax capability, usually operated using a stylus rather than a keyboard
Unaccountably this isn't labelled '(sometimes considered offensive)'. Don't the feelings of us Psion users, who regard anything without a keyboard as a toy, count for anything?
Friday, March 22, 2002
Chris Cooper as a pundit on the stock market: what a jest!
Posted today to the LA Forum:
___
[CC] I dare say the list is bored with this topic by now, but having just noticed
this post from Patrick [Crozier], which I'd inexplicably missed, I feel I should
respond as best I can. Which is strictly amateurishly (my wife will tell
anyone who's interested that my free advice about getting rich is worth
precisely what you paid for it).
>
[PC] One objection to the idea that you can't beat the market (I hope that is
indeed the idea here) is that there are clearly lots of people who ARE being
beaten by the market. That tends to imply (in a generally rising market)
that there others who are doing the beating.
>
[CC] You can beat the market (or be beaten by it) by chance, and a statistically
fixed proportion of people will - just as will a fixed proportion of
coin-tossers. It's whether you can do better than chance that's the issue.
>
[PC] But I suppose my real objection is that at the end of the day these are
real
businesses, making real decisions about real products and selling them to
real people. And shareholders (although many forget this) are real owners.
Shareholders are making judgements about managements and some people have
better judgement than others. If that wasn't the case then, hell, we might
as well allocate jobs by lottery.
>
[CC] It's true I'm accusing the customers of those funds that claim special skill
in the market (as opposed to index-tracking funds, say) of being deluded and
irrational. And that makes me sound like some socialist busybody slavering
for new regulation to save the children from themselves. Naturally, I don't
advocate that, but I do believe in the possibility of sustained
irrationality. It seems to have been demonstrated in human behaviour in the
area of judging probabilities and risks.
After all, there's a flourishing business in gambling on horse-racing; it's
irrational to take that seriously, but an entire industry is built on the
people who do.
Friday, March 15, 2002
The saga continues. Today's posting to the LA Forum:
I wrote:
> And the whole voodoo practice spreads the notion that
> there's such a thing as having the skill to beat the market.
And Patrick Crozier wrote:
> Well, Warren Buffett seems to have been doing it rather well for about 30
years now. He even managed to avoid the whole dotcom hysteria.
'dot.com hysteria' was a vice of people who thought you *can* predict the market. I recommended buying and selling randomly - the opposite of following a craze.
However, I don't know about Warren Buffett, Patrick. I'd like to be enlightened by others before I start believing in his magical intuition.
But I was prompted by this challenge to look for some academic underpinning for my somewhat plonking assertion, dredged up from dimly remembered economics textbooks that I read in the distant past. I found a useful book review from 1999 on Business Week Online, reproduced below. (Sorry, I've lost the URL.)
Its bottom line seems to be that my position - that you can't beat the market - is academic orthodoxy, and is owed to 'A Random Walk Down Wall St', by Burton G. Malkiel, 1973. It's sufficiently orthodox to now be challenged by Andrew W. Lo and A. Craig MacKinlay, who rather desperately title their counterblast ' A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street'.
They point out that patterns in share prices might appear that are too subtle for the ordinary investor to detect, but which strenuous efforts by PhDs with supercomputers could tease out. I'm sure it's true, and could temporarily benefit the wealthiest top players in the markets, but to emphasize a couple of telling quotes in the article below:
"Lo and MacKinlay actually agree with Malkiel's advice to the average investor. If you don't have any special expertise or the time and money to find expert help, they say, go ahead and purchase index funds."
" At times in their book, he and MacKinlay sound just as diffident about beating the market as Malkiel, their elder"
>>
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : MAY 31, 1999 ISSUE
FINANCE
Can You Really Beat the Market?
A new book reopens the debate over whether it's possible to predict the movement of stock prices
Andrew W. Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology remembers the excitement of reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street when he was in high school in the 1970s. In it, Princeton University economist Burton G. Malkiel made the case that stock prices are unpredictable--as random as the lurching of a drunk. Says Lo: ''That was one of the first books that got me interested in economics. It was an eye-opener.''
An eye-opener, maybe, but hardly a guiding light. Today, as a finance professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Lo is working to prove that Malkiel and his fellow random-walkers are wrong--that shrewd investors can beat the market after all. He and collaborator A. Craig MacKinlay of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School have even written a book called A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street. It was published in March--two months before Malkiel came out with a thoroughly revised seventh edition of his own book, which has sold more than 500,000 copies.
FAIR REWARDS. Random-walk theory says that investors can't beat the stock market because news travels too rapidly. When a new bit of information emerges, investors react to it almost instantly, bidding a stock's price up or down until it reaches a new equilibrium. Therefore, the only things that the market hasn't taken into account are things that haven't happened yet. Those events are, by definition, random. You can count on making money in the long run only because prices generally trend upward, in line with economic growth.
But markets don't know everything, say the authors of A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street. People who devote enough time, money, and brainpower can beat the market by finding undervalued companies or discovering persistent price patterns, say Lo and MacKinlay. Their profits are ''simply the fair reward to breakthroughs in financial technology,'' they argue.
This is no sterile academic debate. Investors are taking sides every time they select a place to put their money. Random-walkers buy index funds. Disbelievers in the random walk are more likely to play the market--whether successfully, like Warren E. Buffett, or unsuccessfully, like your average small-time day trader.
When Malkiel wrote the first edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street in 1973, he was the one challenging the conventional wisdom. At the time, random-walk theory was a scholarly notion unfamiliar to the average investor. Malkiel infuriated Wall Street brokerage firms by writing that their expensive advice was pretty much worthless. Index funds that match market averages didn't even exist in 1973; he wrote that they should. Here's a quote from the first edition: ''Whenever below-average performance on the part of any mutual fund is noticed, fund spokesmen are quick to point out, 'You can't buy the averages.' It's time the public could.'' Malkiel was ahead of his time: Today, about 20 cents of every retail dollar going into mutual funds goes into index funds.
SLOW RETREAT. By the time Lo and MacKinlay began collaborating, random-walk theory was catching on with the general public--and remained a shibboleth of academic finance. Their book recounts how in 1986, when they presented their first academic paper statistically rejecting the random walk, their discussant--''a distinguished economist and senior member of the profession''--assured them that they must have made a programming error. Ever since, random-walkers in academia have been forced into a slow but steady retreat.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Lo and MacKinlay actually agree with Malkiel's advice to the average investor. If you don't have any special expertise or the time and money to find expert help, they say, go ahead and purchase index funds. Where Lo and MacKinlay part company is over Malkiel's insistence that even the top investment professionals can't do better than garden-variety index funds, because any edge is wiped out by the costs of research and extra trading. Malkiel points out that a Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fund with annual expenses equaling 0.2% of assets has outperformed 90% of actively managed mutual funds over the last 3, 5, and 10 years. What's more, funds that beat the S&P over one time scale may not beat it over another.
True, acknowledge Lo and MacKinlay. But they insist that the best pros can still beat the market by analyzing the data and exploiting the subtle regularities that they discover. Evidence of that, they say, is that Wall Street firms continue to pour money into supercomputers and PhDs.
One big difference, of course, is that you can't (for now, anyway) protect the profits from a successful trading strategy by patenting it. Others will soon duplicate your strategy and, by so doing, take the profit out of it. The January effect, in which small stocks consistently rose in January, disappeared when it started getting too much publicity. Random-walkers say this process occurs so quickly that extra profits are a mirage. Not so, Lo and MacKinlay argue. Says MacKinlay: ''As different trading strategies emerge, new anomalies can appear, or past anomalies can reappear.''
Where are today's exploitable anomalies? Lo and MacKinlay argue that fast computers, chewing on newly available, tick-by-tick feeds of market-transactions data, can detect regularities in stock prices that would have been invisible as recently as five years ago. One example: ''clientele bias,'' in which certain stocks are popular with investors who have certain trading styles. A case in point that doesn't take a supercomputer to detect is day traders' current enthusiasm for Internet stocks. Lo says that day traders tend to overreact to news--whether that news is positive or negative--so it should be possible to profit by taking the opposite side of their trades.
DIFFIDENCE. Lo is even open-minded about technical analysis--that is, calling turns in the market by studying patterns in price charts such as ''head and shoulders formations'' and ''resistance levels.'' To Malkiel and most other professors, technical analysis is about as scientific as palm-reading. In his book, Malkiel calls it ''anathema to the academic world.'' Yet Lo, a bona fide academic, is working with some of his MIT colleagues on computer software that identifies some of the chartists' favorite formations in a consistent way. His next step is to determine whether these patterns have any predictive value. Says Lo: ''It could be that technical analysis summarizes in a very compact way the influences of supply and demand.''
But Lo is hardly advocating that you turn over your savings to chartists. Or to fundamental stock-pickers, for that matter. At times in their book, he and MacKinlay sound just as diffident about beating the market as Malkiel, their elder. ''Indeed,'' they write, ''although there are probably still only a few ways to make money reliably, the growing complexity of financial markets has created many more ways to lose it, and lose it quickly.'' That's a sentiment that random and nonrandom walkers can agree on wholeheartedly.
-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Crozier [mailto:patrick_crozier@cableinet.co.uk]
Sent: 14 March 2002 19:45
To: libertarian-alliance-forum@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [LA-F] Doing scams scientifically
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Cooper" To: Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 7:03 PM
Subject: RE: [LA-F] Doing scams scientifically
> Right on, Boris! Our keyboard Rambo has blasted the bad guys right between
> the eyes.
>
> Essentially the same scam is practised by *any* financial institutions or
> market tipsters who trade on a string of successes to advertise their own
> superior forecasting skill. You might see some unit trust being commended
> for beating the market six years in a row; but you'd expect 1 in 64
> coin-tossers to do equally well.
>
> In the same way, fund managers get bonuses and promotions on the strength
of
> their runs of luck. And the whole voodoo practice spreads the notion that
> there's such a thing as having the skill to beat the market.
>
Well, Warren Buffett seems to have been doing it rather well for about 30
years now. He even managed to avoid the whole dotcom hysteria.
Thursday, March 14, 2002
Another post to the LA Forum:
____
Boris Kuperschmidt wrote:
There's a classic stock market advice scam. It goes like this: You take 512
randomly chosen suckers and send each of
them a mail message making a "free prediction" about the market. You tell
256 of them that the market will rise during the next week, and the other
256 that it will fall. It'll do one or the other.
Whichever it does, you forget about the other guys and never mail them
again. The ones you were right with, however, you divide again into
halves. 128 of them receive a letter saying the market will rise, the
other that the market will fall. And again, you drop half of them based on
what happens.
Do this three more times, and you now have a group of 16 people that have
received five consecutive correct predictions ...
One of the 16 who got all five correct predictions doesn't see all the
other people who got
wrong ones; all he sees is five straight correct answers. Pretty
convincing, isn't it?
>>>
And I responded:
Right on, Boris! Our keyboard Rambo has blasted the bad guys right between
the eyes.
Essentially the same scam is practised by *any* financial institutions or
market tipsters who trade on a string of successes to advertise their own
superior forecasting skill. You might see some unit trust being commended
for beating the market six years in a row; but you'd expect 1 in 64
coin-tossers to do equally well.
In the same way, fund managers get bonuses and promotions on the strength of
their runs of luck. And the whole voodoo practice spreads the notion that
there's such a thing as having the skill to beat the market.
And why can't you beat the market? Because it's designed to make it
impossible. If some valid piece of evidence indicates to you that some stock
has a bright future, it will send exactly the same signals to many other
players in the market. The price of the stock will rise, and its
benefit/cost ratio will fall back to the general market level.
So do your own share trading, buying and selling completely at random, and
benefit from capitalist markets' long-term rise in share values, while
saving on fund managers' costs.
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Posted this today on the Libertarian Alliance Forum:
I've just heard Madsen Pirie on the 'Today' programme, talking about African
economic development. He mentioned the African countries' desire for debt to
be 'forgiven' and implied that he agreed with that. He's right, of course.
Western governments were guilty of colluding with the Third World's
kleptocrats and genocides in pouring money down the drain of 'development'
funding. It's right that there should be a once-for-all debt cancellation to
disentangle the mess, and the guilty parties should suffer: the guilty
parties including the lenders and the Western governments. Which means
Western taxpayers will suffer, of course. Well, who else? They're the ones
who supported and financed the global-socialist policies that created the
mess. It's all very unjust, of course, but a lot less unjust than throwing
the whole burden onto the hapless Third World peasant.
Of course, the future dispensation must include no government underwriting
of lending or investing in any foreign countries, rich or poor. Let the
money-providers take their own risks. On these terms, there can be no future
claims for debt cancellations.
Wednesday, March 06, 2002
Does global warming worry you? Then worry some more - there's no limit to the harm it can do. Barmy link of the day:
Global Warming and the Meltdown of the Inner Core Temperature increases on the surface of Earth are amplified 15 times at the Earth's core. Meltdown of the core could lead to a gigantic atomic explosion.
http://sci-e-research.com/geophysics.html 1:41 PM
"We have more sex education than ever before; we have more teenage / extramarital / unwanted pregnancies than ever before. So sex education isn't working."
However, we're having more sex than ever before. So I'm pretty sure pregnancies per sex act are fewer than ever before. Hence, the cost/benefit ratio has moved in the right direction.
9:11 AM
Monday, March 04, 2002
I've just been listening to Paxman's Monday morning show. One of his guests was an author called, I think, Gaby Woods, who's written a book about automata, called 'Living Dolls'. The famous 19th-century chess-playing Turk came up. The other guests expressed amazement that (as they supposed) no-one had ever realized that a chess-player must be concealed in the mechanism. The author had nothing to add except more amazement.
Of course, a hidden human being must have been the first assumption of everyone who saw the machine. But some stage-magician trickery was performed to persuade witnesses that there was nothing but machinery inside the automaton's cabinet: doors were opened and closed, and only cogwheels were visible.
Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the machine and wrote a long analysis of it. If I recall it correctly, he began with a metaphysical argument that no machine could be capable of thought; he then went on to consider the mechanics of concealing a human being inside the machine and enabling him to follow the game and make the moves.
I don't think any confession by the machine's builder and its many operators has ever been found. We can be just as certain as Poe that there was a human being inside it – beginning not from his dodgy philosophy but from experience. We speak with the authority of a technology that has succeeded in creating genuine chess-playing machines after failing to do so for more than a century after the Turk.
But we have better arguments than "We succeeded in the 20th century using these methods; therefore they could not have succeeded in the 19th using any other." We also rely on the mathematical analyses, such as the demonstration of the huge numbers of states that a chess-playing machine has to have, and the speed of operation that is inescapably needed. We're entitled to say that not only was no such machine ever built with gearwheels, but it never could be.
The seeming achievements of the machine were an affront to Poe's desperate rationality. He could not stand the thought that the real world might be as frighteningly inexplicable and deceptive as the world of his stories. He deployed massive reasoning against the impossible eruption of a thinking machine into the world; he satisfied himself that he had triumphed as overwhelmingly as his fictitious detective Auguste Dupin triumphed over the eruption of crime into that world.
>>>
Message written in the dust on the back of a van: "I wish my bitch was as dirty as this!"
