Buying Tomorrow | Hacker News Reader

Buying Tomorrow

laphamsquarterly.org

54 pointspg17 comments

> "In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, written during the Great Depression, Keynes likened the activity to a newspaper contest in which, “The competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.”

This seems like it would be an interesting game; the last time I saw it was when I had a customer hosting the same (using porn images, and real money, back in 2001). I didn't know it was from Keynes back then!

Is there anything like this today (other than financial markets in general; I mean something purely in the form of a game, and iterated with discrete rounds, vs. fairly continous).

Reality TV; survivor, weakest link, etc. Vote the worst person off. Appeals hugely with democratic cultures.

The more subtle ones I know of are related to prisoner's dilemma. However, it varies per cultural areas.

I'd be up for taking part in such an experiment, and testing a few other classics at the same time. I've long wanted to conduct the Pirate Game(1) in real life (adapted to remove the death part). It could be done online, but it might be difficult to simulate the back-channels, which seem required to me. And maybe it would be more fun to get 50 or so folks together in one room for a Saturday and do it..

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_game

I have a couple technologies I selfishly want to use for this (security stuff). Hrm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Related: The NPR podcast Planet Money recently held a "contest" where you had to pick the number from 0 to 100 that would be the average of all guesses. If you assume everyone is rational (and everyone's estimate of each other's rationality, recursively) it should be 0; the actual answer was around 11.5.

the average of all guesses

Should be something like "two-thirds of the average of all guesses".

This might not be exact one I'm remembering, but there was an interesting article posted here a few months back on Goldman Sachs and how they corned the wheat futures market: http://theglobalrealm.com/2011/02/04/the-food-bubble-how-wal...

Hmm...

    $ wc <text copy of this article>
    66    4283   31540 <text copy of this article>

Anyone care to write at TL;DR?

Kinda hard to TL;DR actually. It's a poetic history of gambling on the future and how every new twist on the practice causes crashes, regulations, etc. And the history goes back to ancient Rome. In conclusion, we haven't mastered predicting the future and mitigating risk but have an unhealthy obsession to do so. The article is so long because it's so poetic.

Would also suggest to anyone interested in this topic to check out anything written by Nassim Taleb. Both of his main stream books are good ("Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan"). Black Swan is more general while Fooled slants towards finance. Peter Bernstein's "Against the Gods" about the history of risk is also great and a little less wordy than Talebs.

This is ironic, as one of the points of Lapham's Quarterly is to restore excellence to long-form journalism.

Side note: a subscription to LQ would make a great Christmas present for discerning types.

Other side note: this video of Lapham at Google, although uneven, contains some first-rate material about the history of journalism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQYkTttj7k.

Lapham's is a great publication. Especially for anyone who loves history (through the words of those living it, without the benefit of hindsight).

Though, you definitely have to love reading also to make it worth your while. Some of it can get pretty dense. I usually end up reading only 2 or 3 of the articles but still get a lot out of it.

The emphasis on history is really the killer feature. I almost posted this a few days ago because I love how they frame older documents in modern contexts:

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/question-and-...

I didn't, in the end, because I decided it would lead to a useless discussion about how stupid Gandhi was.

On a tangential note, wouldn't it be great if there were a news network (say like NPR, the good parts) whose focus was to include history in everything? For example, when covering the Libyan war, also cover the colonial history, previous wars fought there (http://www.google.ca/#ssource=hp&q=%22benghazi+stakes%22) - really anything related would do. We could better understand what's going on, learn things of substance, and the material wouldn't have to be the same old recycled talking points bullshit, because you'd have all of history to draw on. (It needn't just be history, either; that's just where the most ready material would be.) Rather than interviewing bobbleheads for their opinions, interview scholars for their learning. I bet you could get some pretty good historians to go on for cheap.

Completely agree. I'd personally love something like that. But then again, I'd think it would be a very VERY niche product. I have trouble enough convincing people I know to watch an episode of Charlie Rose.

Can you get all of the articles online? What's the paid $29/yr digital subscription getting you as far as extra content? Is the digital format lame? (Ideal would be directly into instapaper)

I still like Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs the best of all subscriptions, followed by the Economist.

Sorry, I don't know. I just read the occasional article on the web (and it popped into my head that a subscription would be the perfect gift for someone I know).

This line is remarkable:

" We court an exquisite ruin whenever we succumb to a pretty face that we fail to recognize as our own. "

Reply on news.ycombinator.com