MP,I believe you are being willfully obtuse on this subject. By construction, abstract problems are not obvious, and are not going to be posted all over the internet or anywhere else. Very few people are sitting around thinking, "Shit, all my problems are really abstract and complex. If only someone could solve them." Most people, when faced with a world that is abstract and complex,perceive it in terms of simple, concrete problems because, as you say, those are the problems to which they have proximity.If you only focus on the simple problems, you are constrained by diminshing marginal returns. Every problem you solve within a given process will make you more productive by a smaller increment than the previous problem you solved. But if you get some perspective, you can change the paradigm within which you operate and experience large jumps in productivity. Like switching from artisanal labor to assembly line factories, or from open outcry to electronic exchanges.

"Like switching from artisanal labor to assembly line factories, or from open outcry to electronic exchanges."Are you saying these were products of smart people, or even of human reason at all, rather than accidents?When the CME built Globex, it was for night trading, and then minis were just too insiginificant for pit traders to be bothered.The problem solved by Levine and Citron when they programmed a computer to route limit orders into a Nasdaq market-maker quotation was to avoid tradethroughs of SelectNet Orders. What could be more simple, more narrow than the problem which spawned Island?When Jerry Putnam, Lewis, and that other guy started ARCA, they just wanted to be SOES Bandits, for crying out loud. Then the new order-handling rules hit them like a cloudburst of gumdrops. But, ever since Jerry decided to pursuse a more abstract vision - ArcaEx - all his newly-introduced visions and abstract thoughts have been nothing more than a money hole.When Bill Lupien built Instinet, he had no greater vision, or else he wouldn't have let it go for so cheap. It was just an incremental step above shopping and matching by telephone. But when he channeled hundreds of millions of dollars into an abstract electronic-exchange leap - OptiMark - he got his clock cleaned by an accidental/evolved structure, the NYSE.I would even go further, though. I foresaw with 100% confidence the abstract reasons why OptiMark would fail, and the necessary characteristics of an aternative system that might have worked. But there was only one other person in the entire network of OptiMark visionaries and capitalists who could think abstractly enough to see what I saw, and he didn't pull enough weight. In other words, it was physically impossible for people to understand why their system might not work. And by the time the guy inside the company was able to package it into a sufficiently concrete essay - suffering loss of most of the abstract essence - it was too late to do anything, the credibility and optimism had been spent.Even being a SOES Bandit was never designed by anyone. In fact, it SOES designed in response to the 1987 Crash, without anyone foreseeing the actual consequences that people like Harvey Houtkin would stumble on a way to pick off market-makers, who were just straddling the Nasdaq inside to qualify for the Instinet fast feed.Now, so far as your other example, I don't know much about Henry Ford. But if assembly lines were a product of human reason, then how come they didn't hit in the 16th Century?The entire Internet notion of "critical mass" was abstract, and it was dead wrong from day one, because people didn't understand the cost to people in different parts of the supply chain of sitting on unfilled limit orders for indefinite periods, or trying to react to time-series signals non-redundantly.Nobody had a vision of Silicon Valley or the Internet when the defense-electronics industry was blossoming during the Cold War. Similarly...Maybe I am just missing what you mean by someone understanding abstract, complex problems, Stork.MP

MP,Under your formulation, all nodes are equivalent. the determinant of a systems productivity is its structure, in the sense of what information it is proximate to, and has nothing to do with differences between individual nodes. Am I understanding this correctly?If this is the case, it would make more sense to hire 100 retards instead of 1 talented person. Why doesn't that happen?The part I can't get my head around is how informational structures will spontaneously self organize in your world. Even if we accept that structure is everything and individual skill is nothing, how do these structures arise? Is it not possible for a node to influence the structure, thereby altering its own importance?

The reason you hire 1 smart person instead of 2 'tards is if phones are expensive. To connect 2 retards to each other and to the outside world, takes 3 times as many lines.Individual neurons are nodes. But there is this huge logjam at the sensory boundary, so carpool structures form around natural friction patterns.Unlike, for example, bacteria floating in water, the relative position of neurons is static. So, like space, they can only change their topology by fallout.I explored this with Steve Jurvetson regarding nano-biotech. My conclusion was that appropriate structures must be bred using actual entropy holes.A structure might realize unexpected survival advantages - or costs - any time it plugs in a new node with incompletely knowable properties.Consider that once a McDonalds kitchen layout has evolved around the predictable errors of retards, a smart employee will make more errors than a retard!I use the Hitler example to show how an individual can change the structure, but it may cease to reflect the larger entropy hole it filled, and disintegrate.Suppose we use a neural network to solve a financial problem, but throw in one crAzY synapse tree. Is the larger financial system likely to reshape around it?MP

Please start a new topic if you are going to discuss material completely unrelated to the subject of this thread. I HATE having to get an email that a new message has been posted in this thread, only to arrive and see such postings that only serve to aggravate the hell out of me and others who don't give two shits about your inane messages. Thank you.

Arvind,God is channeling through me, to test you, like Job MP

Quoteonly to arrive and see such postings that only serve to aggravate the hell out of me and others who don't give two shits about your inane messages. Thank you.At least you said thank you. But really maybe you should learn to listen to the Duck, he's got a lot of wisdom buried in his posts. That goes for the Stork too. QuoteGod is channeling through me, to test you, like Job Wasn't Job chosen for his exceptional patience?? It seems that with one day of posts you've already snapped our dear friend Arvind, perhaps God needs a new subject to test. Not that I'm volunteering.

Arvind,Maybe you should try the personal ads.Good luck.

The quality of the messages being posted by Stork and MP is not so much being called into question as is the place of advertisement. You guys can quip and make irrelevant comments all you want, but the fact of the matter is that their messages have nothing to do with the subject of this thread. If you would step back and see how that can be of annoyance to someone else, then perhaps you would have the common courtesy to take your messages into a new topic thread.

Actually, Arvind, it may be a positive-sum game.For one, it may continue recycling your thread to the top. If people enjoy my and Stork's content, they will read your thread. Even if people don't like our content, they will see your thread over and over and, eventually, read your seed. There is no such thing as bad publicity (well, almost;-).For another, it is absolutely imperative that very smart people - abstract people - get it through their heads that all their smarts will command a market value of zero, if they don't adopt game-theory procedures for coping with such intrusions by inane morons in a political way.The reason these MBA's get jobs is probably this bizarre self-perpetutation of them all patting each other on the back, and lying to each other to make themselves feel good, rather than calling one another boneheads. Even Internet forums have this strange, self-perpetuating nature.Moreover, "boneheads" is always accurate, we are all ignorant, only on different subjects and at different times. Since, therefore, it reveals no additional information about the person being labeled, it may inadvertently expose the cards of the person choosing to use the label.Maybe, what you are miscalculating, is the cost to other people to discover and read your thread, measured against your own cost of optimizing your check-back frequency. If, by chance, people who click on Island ECN's banner like my posts, you are SOL.Finally, there may be good cause for someone to be bitter, just as there may be good cause for an apple to be rotten. But clever people, because they are so powerful, have an extra burden to demonstrate they are not bitter or vengeful before they can gain admittance into an organization.Finally finally, I don't think ANYONE would EVER hire a person as a trader or risk manager who becomes aggravated by meaningless, extraneous blips so easily. Many personality characteristics contribute to success, which is why I insisted to Stork that simply screening smart people isn't enough. MP

Mob, Congratulations on writing such a clever post. I am sure everyone was just dazzled by your command of the english language.

Again, you have much to learn still my son, in the secrets of achievement.For it is only but one part cleverness, and five parts boredom.Or, where one has serious concerns competing for his time as I do right now, it is 10 parts compulsion*MP*Notice how my paragraphs are usually all the same length

"What I'm trying to get across is this: Specifically relating to financial areas, individuals with high mathematical ability (in general) can grasp concepts such as "market regulation" and "financial economics" with not too much difficulty, whereas individuals in business are not able to apply mathematics so well to finance and are hence rather less skilled from that perspective."TrainThis is what you wrote before. As far as I can see JS and MP have been debating exactly your point and yet you seem to be irritated at them. Perhaps you can explain why? J

Arvind,The topic of your original (and subsequent) posts seems to be something about how business majors and MBA's can get jobs more easily and even get paid more than engineers and mathematicians.MobPsycho and I have been having a debate on this topic, albeit in a somewhat abstract form That you would find this off-topic must mean that either you can't follow the abstraction, and thus possibly aren't as smart as you seem to think you are, or that your purpose for starting this thread was to whine about how the MBAs get all the good jobs and to get some pats on the back from fellow whiners.If it's the first case, take heart, because as you know it's the boneheads who get all the good jobs anyway. If it's the second, I can only suppose that someone such as yourself would be glad because you can easily pick up the business school skills and make lots of money in a cushy job.As for you complaint about being annoyed by getting emails about activity on this thread, I have as little sympathy for you as I do for people who complain about getting too many phone calls -- just don't answer.

Stork, If you at all read my initial and/or subsequent posts, you would clearly see that the thrust of my message is not what you say ("how business majors and MBA's can get jobs more easily and even get paid more than engineers and mathematicians"). I simply wanted advice on something, which to a certain degree I have received. Yes, I do find your's and MP's posts to be off-topic, and that does NOT mean I can't follow the abstraction. Instead of continuing to be so god damn myopic about things, why don't you just start a new thread. And also (this goes for anyone else who does this). Stop tyring to personally attack people in the forum by using such caustic remarks such as "[you] possibly aren't as smart as you seem to think you are." It doesn't make you look too smart. The fact that I described a large mass of individuals as "boneheads" is NOT the same thing. I have acknowledged the exaggeration of that claim and have clarified my view in a subsequent post.