Sunday 30 December 2007

Tall Order

"Too little attention in economics to second order and even higher order effects. This defect is quite understandable, because the consequences have consequences, and the consequences of the consequences have consequences, and so on. It gets very complicated. When I was a meteorologist I found this stuff very irritating. And economics makes meteorology look like a tea party."

- Charles Munger,
Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

My question is how a meteorologist ever got to be vice chairman of a investment company

Anonymous said...

Best wishes for year 2008, Elanor =)

Elanor said...

Happy New Year to Feliz and Chewxy!

__mars said...

w00t!

And he is from Michigan! Go Blue!

zcer said...

eh, it applies to AI as well. http://64.233.179.104/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=cache:aHJSTTyRgh4J:agiri.org/agivolume/AGIBook_2005Jan05.pdf.gz%23page%3D392+

Levels of Organization in General Intelligence
Eliezer Yudkowsky

it's on how the AI community has been beset by 'physics envy' - aiming for some essence of the entire AI problem. Ignoring the inherent complexity of the subject. I think it applies very well to economics as well.

zcer said...

oops, the url didnt wrap! argh... here you go. Levels of Organization in General Intelligence