tolga erkal

heyitsnoah:

The FT had a great article last week on all the different ways economists try to use scientific principles to understand their world. It’s chock full of interesting insights.

Early in the article they explain that while all these banks were diversifying, they were all diversifying in the same way, something we know all understand. What was especially interesting, though, was that when you think of especially diverse ecosystems, like the rainforst, they’re actually not all that strong with “so many interdependent species that it is more vulnerable to an external shock than the simpler ecological diversity of savannahs and grasslands.”

The conlcusion also got me thinking, noting that the problem with the use of all the scientific models in finance is that when they’re used in the way they are they effect the world they’re modeling, something the model does not take into account (in doesn’t need to when it’s just being used to examine/understand the biological world). “Donald MacKenzie of Edinburgh university says the real problem with models is that bankers tend to view them as ‘cameras’ that capture how the world works, like the camera that might photograph a physics experiment. Instead, he argues, they should be viewed as ‘engines’ - since the presence of a model tends to change and drive market behaviour in a way that makes it impossible to assume that the past can predict the future.”

Via: Science and Economics // NoahBrier.com

tigs:

merlin:

inky:

In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut qualifies the list by adding that Flannery O’Connor broke all these rules except the first, and that great writers tend to do that.

I think the first one also applies to advertising.