Samuel > Recent Status Updates

I need to see this enacted. In theatrical form. Gretchen feeling her guilt weigh down on her with Dies Irae being sung just feels like it would be such an experience.

Faust feels eerily modern for its content.

I love Faust's and Mephisto's interactions so much.

"There may simply be futility at the heart of search—no approach to searching can guarantee that you reach your objectives. It’s not enough to give up the idea that objectives are the best way to direct a search. We’ve seen that they’re not. But we’ll also have to abandon the idea that anything can always reveal the path to an ambitious objective."

"But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, their
ephemeral feelings about events, and their expectations of
other people’s feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them."

The authors get it.

Nassim Taleb once mentioned that if one knows the exact structure of their day before they set off for it, they are not alive. In many ways his philosophy and that of the authors of this book are p similar in that they emphasize exploration and trial and error rather than the pursuit of objectives with both concluding that objectives tend to make us blind to the things that would serve us most.

Lots and lots of Physics envy. So much Physics envy.

The introductory chapter sells itself. It provides a great overview of why the book is needed (smart people often go into quantitative finance but lack an understanding of why the field and the industry exist) and the history of equity and debt markets.

The book so far has largely been an encyclopedia of all the ways the world could hypothetically end with some heuristic calculations to quantify risk.

Interesting stuff...