Isaac Chan > Recent Status Updates

Note 3/3:
the customers themselves do - I cannot see now how this can be possible, but I suppose, management consultants possess this skill. The salesforce's job was to anticipate how much customers were willing to pay for Nvidia's superior products; Jensen would provide them with 'reinforcements'. And this echoes what the Trade Product division have said - Soh Fern.

Note 2/3:
This, in Jensen's eyes, was a failure on Moore's part to KYC - Jensen expected each salesperson to be the 'CEO of your accounts'. I, ofc, wish on a daily basis to aspire to this lofty goal - practical constraints (like time itself! And limited attention) hinder me from reaching this ideal, but I strive to improve.

Jensen also expected the Nvidia ARMs to know more about their customers' businesses than ...

Note 1/3:
Possibly the passage in this book that rings the most for my current role - Derik Moore's (a top salesperson at Nvidia) meeting with the HP execs that Jensen joined. The HP execs caught Jensen with a surprise request by demanding Nvidia indemnify the full value of their (HP's) servers; Jensen countered that this is unreasonable, and negotiated to only cover the cost of HP's annual purchases of Nvidia chips.

Note 2/2:
diverse fields.

My immediate thought was whether this same technology is used by trading firms to do matrix pricing for thinly traded securities. And I was proven right almost immediately as the author moves on to discuss the applications of GPUs in the early 2000s for things like options pricing.

Note 1/2
This Mark Harris guy observed way back in 2002 that more and more computer scientists were using GPUs (e.g. Nvidia's GeForce 3) for non-graphics applications: in particular, matrix multiplication. Only a GPU can do matrix multiplication (at least, way back then) because as matrices get larger, the computational complexity increases cubically - but so does their ability to explain real-world problems in ...

Note n/n:

But then, what is the foundation of why we identified custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom? It is now obvious that this is a painful ad infinitum chain of probing that must eventually lead to a BELIEF - that 'custom connects all our causal reasonings'. This belief is but a leap of faith. I have no reason to particularly favour Hume's belief over, say, a rationalist philosopher's belief.

Note 4/n:
itself? Hume observes a phenomenon of the human mind (that we constantly ascribe causes and effects) and he labels a cause to this phenomenon - custom! Why should I hold much faith for Hume's causal identification? I am now very much sceptical of judgments of cause and effect.

We could say that it was custom itself that led Hume to causally infer custom as the driving force of our causal reasonings.

Note 3/n:
cause and effect. Well, Hume comments that our reasonings of effects don't flow logically from observations of causes - they are just connected by custom. And he says that he posits no underlying cause as to why custom operates the way it does in the human mind - this is just a factual observation of human nature. I agree with this, of course.

But is this identification of *custom* not causal reasoning ...

Note 2/n:
*belief* (in other words, ALL people must hold SOME beliefs). Hume considers a study of the nature of belief to be a digression from the core study of epistemology already. For all intents and purposes, we've concluded our epistemological journey.

Ironically, Hume's own commentary on *ad infinitum* led me to find some problems with his identification of custom as the architecture of our reasonings of ...

Note 1/n:
Interestingly, Hume, for whatever reason, posits an argument that is now familiar to me via a variation by Tim Keller: that all judgments of matters of fact cannot be parsed through scepticism ad infinitum - logically, they must ultimately rest on some fact. As C.S. Lewis later put it, one 'cannot continually see through everything ... the final layer must be opaque'. And this final fact is what we call ...

Note n/n:

reason and sustained intellectual activity. Indeed, this is the goal of a human life.

Note 3/n:
in the Enquiry, anyway.

I am surprised that the Academic (NeoPlatonists) became sceptics - was Plato himself a sceptic? My read is that although Plato was definitely wary on asserting certainty on most subjects, due to pure intellectual humility in the face of inherent complexity and nuance of many topics, it is also clear that a key tenet of his philosophy was that it is possible to know the Forms via ...

Note 2/n:
camp. This is a helpful compass, although I still see problems in reconciling degrees-of-probability views with the philosophy that we cannot infer causation from past observations. I still see it as a cheap 'ploy' by Hume to maintain his atheism, as I outlined in my review of 'Of miracles', but I am willing to change my mind on this as I learn more. I will have a chance to revisit 'Of miracles' later on...

Note 1/n:
Hume helpfully distinguishes between (and Millican, more helpfully, directs my attention to) Pyrrhonism and Academic scepticism. Millican explains that Pyrrhonism tilts more towards absolute scepticism (according to Millican!) whereas the Academics allowed for certain judgments being more PROBABLE than others, according to the evidence. Millican says that Hume ultimately places himself more in the latter...

Note 6/n:
observations or samples. This strikes at the heart of 1 of my thoughts (as I outlined in my review of the 'Abstract') - I would love to see a modern econometrician respond to Hume.

Note 5/n:
propositions are not logically joined - they require a medium (IF one is to hold that they are joined via reason, which Hume does not). My question is whether modern Humean research, or any rationalist philosophers after Hume, has shed any light on this medium.

Millican comments that Hume, understandably, does not mention statistical science as a form of reasoning to infer causation from past ...

Note 4/n:
out the obvious reality that it is highly intuitive for the human mind to infer the latter proposition from the former. And Hume knows it, or else there would be no point in writing this book. Perhaps Hume is using 18th-century English, perhaps Hume's genius IQ made it fundamentally unintuitive for him to deduce causation from past observation - who knows? We move.

Hume points out that the 2 ...

Note 3/n:
out to me that it is far from logical for the latter proposition to follow from the former.

Hume says that it is far from 'intuitive' for the latter proposition to logically follow. I get what he's saying, but I would like to query him on his choice of the word 'intuitive'. I do not wish to squabble over definitions, and in fact I think it is the mark of an unserious thinker to do so, but I would point...

Note 2/n:
what is the foundation of experience?' '...... you mothafucka'

I now firmly understand the demarcation between the 2 propositions: 'Such and such effects have always been conjoined with such and such objects/ events', and 'Such and such effects will always follow from such and such objects/ events'. The latter is always inferred from the former, and in fact it is common sense to do so, but Hume points ...

Note 1/n:
The agenda is clearer to me now, as to why we ask the central question 'Why do we hold that every object in existence must have a cause?' The ever-deeper probing of the foundation of our thought is clear: From 'What is the foundation of all our judgments concerning matters of fact?' 'Cause and effect.' 'Well then, what is the foundation of our judgments of cause and effect?' 'Experience.' 'Well then, ...

Note n/n:

interest, etc: and these concepts can help me succeed in the phenomenal world.

Note 3/n:
hard to understand the phenomenal world, accepting that he/ we can never know the noumena.

Cuz who cares if the noumena might be a naked old guy who struts shamelessly around gym locker rooms and dries his balls with the hand-drying machine - all I care about is that the phenomenal world validates concepts such as the price-specie-flow mechanism, time-tested principles of value investing and compound ...

Note 2/n:
But it is also not difficult to accept the fact that we can never transcend the bounds of experience, and make do with 'rationalisation within experience'. In fact, such acceptance might be the very key to 'practical wisdom' and 'practical knowledge'. So, to me, Hume had already gained the same intuition that Kant later formalized - through his extensive economic and political works, I think he laboured ...

Note 1/n:
More on rationalisation in a world bounded by experience: I find myself becoming more interested in the fact that Hume himself rationalised often, despite expounding the doctrine of skepticism. It seems quite clear to me now, that it is not difficult to accept the conclusion that all our judgments of 'matters of fact' can only stem from fickle experience, and there is nothing certain in this experience.

Note n/n:
Black-Scholes, pricing kernels, general equilibrium models ... these are just various examples of the 'relations of ideas'. In fact I am of the opinion that overenthusiasm for elegant 'relations of ideas' can have disastrous consequences for the real economy, for example the neoclassical ideologies that led to financial underregulation prior to the GFC.

Note 6/n:
a different critique - I wish to focus on the 'relations of ideas'. It is literally the case that knowledge of 'relations of ideas' do not require empirical experience, so, why does Hume say that all knowledge must come from experience?

In fact, there exist many 'relations of ideas' within MODERN economics that completely do not require empirical observation - we would call them 'theory papers' now.

Note 5/n:
observation cycle - but bits and pieces of observations (for example, maybe prior consistent examples of bullion inflows were followed by domestic inflation) allowed Hume to form his mosaic, to seemingly rationalise these meta-principles of both the mind and of economics.

I now might posit - all rationalisation is the reorganization within the mind of prior experience.

But I now direct my attention to...

Note 4/n:
have had an insight into these principles through prior experience themselves! The nature of 'prior experience' is scattered - it is of course extremely unlikely, to the point of being impossible, that one would directly experience the modes of thought of the mind, or directly experience Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism unfold in real time, or the quantity theory of money over a fully contiguous ...

Note 3/n:
indignation of Hume's 'Of miracles', which I read some months ago in 2025. In my review of 'Of miracles', I raised the objection that - did Hume not RATIONALISE (in the vein of Descartes) the workings of the mind? Of economics? This rationalisation seemed a direct contradiction to me back then. I am now able to respond to my own objection: Hume APPEARED to rationalise these principles, but he could only ...

Note 2/n:
in fact, gives me much practical solace: I now understand more vividly my disorientation during the SS2 months - many times did I doubt the rigour of my faculties of reason themselves. I operated under the vague assumption that a mind with refined intellect could somehow infer the cause and effects of LOS and AS400 via pure reason - I now commit those thoughts to the flames.

I am now able to revisit my...