I want to cut out a definition and rationale for an “all and everything” perspective, and then discuss the problems of doing so. I think the best thing to consider in attempting to do so is a short video on the history of Youtube. It came from a teacher getting his class together to divide up and read every article about Youtube posted over ten years. The relevant and interesting facts were put together into a more digestible and relatable form.
This video was achievable for a few reasons. Youtube isn’t that old. Most, if not literally all of its history is readily available from primary sources or authors. It had an entire class working together and collaborating as to what was going to count as “interesting” and “relevant.” They had tools to share the same kind of mindspace online along the way. And as a subject matter, it’s a pretty straight forward task.
In my view, what this teacher and class did is the kind of spot on collaborative effort that needs to be made about and across subjects. This is, of course, the scientific endeavor, but finding the people capable of understanding and relating the information from ever-specific disciplines proves elusive. To then make them cross over and be properly weighted is another task entirely.
It’s a little like trying to predict the weather. With things becoming more and more connected, or, with us better able to see the connections that have always been there, we understand that we can’t apply bandages to deeper institutional illnesses. Or, we should hopefully begin to understand. It’s small steps from environmental or economic policy to the realm of foreign policy, for example. Saying something like “let them fight it out” if they’re fighting because your hand is in their jar, makes the alleged solutions, and lazy stating of the problems, problems in their own right.
In theory, we could be the kind “history of Youtube” efficient and “accurate enough” with a dedicated collaborative effort. We certainly apply the rationale to large governmental institutions who commission studies and put together reports about which way our dick should swing into the future. It seems simply and stupidly that it’s general politicking that prevents action on those reports. Think tanks are constantly putting out statistics on income inequality or the economy. I want a research team that helps remove or circumvent the idiot roadblocks.
I just read about the the man responsible for putting together our entire defense strategy, stringing psychological profiles of world leaders among troves of other data to accurately predict the Soviet Union collapse and China emerging as our greatest competitor/threat. In fairness, this is merely brushing over what he likely got wrong in his lengthy career, but the implication is that even the head of the world’s most dominant military apparatus is trying to put a million piece puzzle together for the rest of the world to marvel and follow.
I think our biggest clue is the mad dash internet companies and governments engage in to get ALL THE DATA and then comb through and sort it to make sure we’re directly marketed to or spied on right up to the point of almost entering our bodies; I suppose if you forgo thinking about medical records.
But it goes wrong and gets complicated. As the days following a mass shooting seem to confirm, you can have ties to shady organizations, raise all kinds of red flags that put you on lists, and even boast on facebook months and days before what you’re about to do, and nothing’s stopping you. We still don’t have the technology to filter out all the noise of trillions of data points into something coherent, let alone predictive. And it’s not like our “journalistic” apparatus is helping while they report on a killer’s blank calendar during an awkward apartment raid.
Yet we pretend we’re coherent or are able to predict. I’m endlessly frustrated when I attempt to read about the stock market, for example. I’d put money on the idea that I could hand over ten web pages of the most popular and most touted authors writing about the market and couldn’t find 2 traders to agree or make sense of what’s been said. Every doomsdayer has their own personal “oh shit” chart. Every brand with something to sell tells you to invest in gold. Even in my insanely basic understanding of the issues surrounding the market, I can pick up on lines of total bullshit mixed in with genuine worries or sense. “We should go back to the gold standard!” seated comfortably against “we’ve inflated the derivatives market to even higher levels than before the crash and gains we see are from quantitative easing and stock buyback strategies, not from more production.”
You can’t tell if the people writing it really don’t know any better, or if the whole thing is so wildly irrational, everything passes because everyone is afraid of admitting how full of shit they are. You’re left walking away with sort of folk knowledge like “all bubbles burst” or “the bailout worked and needed to be bigger.” Then you get to watch Adam McKay on Colbert explain that even the people who bet against the country during the crash, and made out like bandits, get a thousand yard stare when they consider “everything they knew was a lie,” and those lies have only gotten bigger and more complicated today. I find the fear and confusion from even the winners more compelling than your chart you can’t relate in English.
I suppose I just feel so inefficient and insincere. If I forced myself to read a book a day about the financial crisis, it would be less helpful than 5 people compiling the last 100 articles referencing “collapse” or compiling authors and their predictions to pick out who tends to be full of shit the least. That seems like the honest way to feel “smart” about talking about the market or whom we can look to when discussing how it behaves. There’s nothing like a 15 page in-depth analysis depicting how terrible 2015 is gonna be, posted on January 2, that you read and just poke holes through today on December 12. The guy worked at some high end firm, sure sounded professional and full of himself, and was wildly off the mark despite being linked to by higher trafficked sites. The author who did so saying “while I don’t agree with all (some 50+) points, but if what he says is true, we’re in for some trouble.”
Yeah, if, not “hey this helps my narrative to scare you, meager qualifier, hazah! Take that to bed!”
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