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Musings Report 2017:25 6-25-17 Can Amateurs Accomplish What Experts Can't?
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Can Amateurs Accomplish What Experts Can't?
As a companion piece to last week's Musings Report on the decline of faith in experts, let's look at the role of amateurs in the advance of insight, knowledge and innovation.
A recent book, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, addresses the idea that amateurs can contribute in ways experts cannot, as amateurs look on orthodoxy with fresh eyes.
The book is described as "A passionate attack on the tyranny of experts," but it seems the author's primary point is that the "amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable and seeks independence--and changes the world."
I have not yet read the book, but his examples are interesting, if not immediately compelling--though Jane Jacobs, the noted critic of urban redevelopment as "social planning," seems like a good fit for his model.
The outstanding example that comes to my mind is the person or persons who coded bitcoin, and delivered crypto-currencies to the world. Clearly, the inventors of bitcoin had a very deep knowledge of programming and cryptology, and so perhaps we can't say they were amateurs.
But since they clearly did not work in a national lab or for a major corporation, they were certainly outsiders.
I have been told that famous professors of physics often trail a coterie of amateur scientists eager to share their profound insights in the workings of the Universe with the Great Professor. I mention this as an example of a field where amateurs have a much harder time making advances because the knowledge of the field has become so specialized and is moving forward at such a rapid pace, with dozens or hundreds of research papers being published every month, that amateurs would become experts were they to master the knowledge base and keep up on the latest developments.
The arts, entertainment, social structures and the computer sciences are more accessible to amateurs, as specialized training seems to impose a sort of groupthink on aspirants that drains many professionals of the ability to see things with fresh eyes.
Some fields such as economics are dominated by credentialed experts, yet the world doesn't seem to respond quite as the experts project, and so amateurs such as myself see an opening for "outside" commentary.
Expertise can generate a counter-movement, especially if the status quo operated by credentialed experts is failing, or the field of endeavor has stagnated.
Punk Rock, for example, was to some degree a reaction to the technical expertise required to play stadium-rock and the increasing complexity of mainstream rock recordings.
Was the famous Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin an amateur? Since he worked at a bank before taking up painting, he seems to fit the bill of an amateur. In music, The Beatles famously could not read sheet music--presumably the minimum required for even beginning musical "experts."
Is the amateur/expert divide only a matter of knowledge and expertise, or is it more a matter of being driven to pursue something that is poo-poo'd by "experts" as impossible or unworthy?
or is simply the freedom granted to non-professional outsiders to innovate and experiment?
In many cases, it seems "amateurs" bring what they learned in apparently unrelated fields to bear on a new field that arouses intense interest in them.
Perhaps that describes the birth of crypto-currencies by the inventors of bitcoin (pen-name Satoshi Nakamoto). Though the blockchain is a computer technology, it seems poised to disrupt the real-world economy and many non-computer science fields currently dominated by credentialed experts.
Interestingly, all those experts in economics, social policy, finance, etc., have been reduced to amateurs in terms of their insight into the blockchain and crypto-currencies.
That's what innovation does--it disrupts established fields and opens new territories for amateurs to explore.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
The Over-Criminalization of American Life 6/23/17
Automation's Destruction of Jobs: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet 6/21/17
What Is the Market Telling Us? 6/20/17
We're in a Boiling-Point Crisis of Exploitive Elites 6/19/17
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Cleaned out a storage area that had descended into chaos due to too much junk and lack of organization. Burned a huge number of calories doing so--unintended benefit...
Market Musings: When Does the Market Finally Crash?
It's pretty obvious the global stock market rally has overstayed its welcome after 8+ years, and many research services of Wall Street heavyweights are sounding the alarm about the auto industry's slump, the slowing of new credit and other indicators that a recession is becoming more likely.
Few have taken the risk of projecting a date for the crash, this gent being a brace outlier: Hedge Fund CIO Sets The Day When The Next Crash Begins.
Next February is a good guess, as recessions and market downturns tend to lag the credit market by about 9 months.
My own guess is it's a bit too early for a good sharp decline; there's too many Bears describing all this gloomy data.
That creates the classic Wall of Worry for markets to keep lofting higher. Central banks buying $300 billion of assets a month helps that continuing ascent most admirably.
That said, the September-October window for a Spot of Bother in markets is creaking open, however grudgingly, as central banks make noises about ending their extraordinary monetary easing policies and raising interest rates a bit so they can lower them when the recession grabs the global economy by the throat.
A sharp decline in October would flush the Bears out, and that would set up a Buy the Dip Santa Claus rally that wipes out all those who dared to short the market.
Nothing like a well-engineered panic selling to set up a profitable Buy the Dip opportunity.
Since the market is such a well-oiled signaling device, we can anticipate a nominal new high after the Spot of Bother, just to destroy all those who reckoned a double-top would market The Top.
It probably won't be that easy.
After the nominal new high in Q4 2017 or Q1 2018, the remaining Bears will be hesitant to bet on further increases in volatility, and other players will note that despite the dire warnings of analysts and the gloomy data on auto sales, credit expansion, productivity, wages, etc., the market keeps chugging higher.
This will infuse participants with complacency and a general sense that the market has weathered the worst than could be thrown at it.
When the surviving Bears have become wary, and the market's resilience in the tide of negative news seems to point to further gains--at that point, the market finally rolls over and "surprises" everyone.
Could be Valentine's Day, or maybe earlier or maybe later. The key is there can't be a crowd of analysts predicting a decline and begging everyone to go to cash. There can't be huge short interest and massive bets on rising volatility.
The crash has to catch almost everyone off guard--those who went broke betting on the market responding rationally to deteriorating data (i.e. those who bet on rising volatility and a market decline), those steeped in complacency and those secure in their faith that the central banks "have our back and will never let the market drop."
When those conditions are met, the Crash Meter will peg 100.
From Left Field
Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years -- triple entry accounting and the blockchain...
The most dangerous AI: Political bias in artificial intelligence algorithms
Teenagers Have Stopped Getting Summer Jobs—Why? (via Joel M.)
McDonald's hits all-time high as Wall Street cheers replacement of cashiers with kiosks--inevitable...
Will Humans Be Necessary? Career and personal implications of increasing automation (Marty Nemko)
How privatization could spell the end of democracy (via Joel M.) RE: healthcare: "A profit-driven system doesn’t mean we get more for our money – it means someone gets to make more money off of us. The healthcare industry posts record profits and rewards its chief executives with the highest salaries in the country. It takes a peculiar frame of mind to see this arrangement as anything resembling efficient."
-- This should be amended to a profit-driven state-cartel system...
Ethereum Growing Exponentially in China
iPayNow uses Quorum, a version of Ethereum incorporating transactional privacy open-sourced by JP Morgan. The company provides aggregated payment service to hundreds of thousands of business clients, such as JD.com, MI, Baidu, Meituan, Ctrip and etc. To them, it is clear that blockchain technology will lead the next generation of mobile payment market.
Blockchain for the Rest of Us -- another primer...
Gene-Editing Algae Doubles Biofuel Output Potential (via Steve K.) -- CRISPR generating commercial products...
The Empire of Debt (61 minutes) (CHS with Cris Sheridan)
Are You a Self-Interrupter? Distraction in the technology age. (via Maoxian)
Asgardia: the world's first space nation (via Steve K.) -- the humble beginnings of The Foundation's galactic Empire?...
"It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." Seneca
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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