….semantics and parsing are perhaps symptoms of a lack of a gestalt understanding of things.

Arendt says:
thought = deep
good = deep

This is not to say thought = good

Nick says:
empathy =

Tom,

80% chance you get no response..

Re the iPod: this would be an interesting area to look. Is the iPod’s random generator hitting some kind of ‘mean’?

Most of what you will hear here falls under the rubric of ‘pattern selection bias’.

The best example is when survivors of an airplane accident say they knew it was going to happen.

If you are not too distracted when boarding a plane, you will notice the crash thought cross your mind – it is almost unavoidable to have that thought. When there is an accident, you reference that thought and bingo ! you knew it was going to happen.

The only way to know what a share price will do is to listen to conference calls, build a financial model, and convert that info into a future share price Having done that I can tell you that the information on financial message boards is clueless.
Don’t get me wrong, the people who post there are very bright people. Nonetheless, they spend their message board time being fooled by randomness and making up theories regarding a ‘single manipulative entity’.

In October 2006, I stopped trading a particular stock. I told many people that the company would miss their earnings estimates at the year end earnings release in 2007 and I told them that the president would be fired.

Almost six-months have gone by and now I am getting e-mails from some who listened + sold, and some who listened + didn’t sell – they are congratulating me on making such a prescient call.

The bizarre thing: no one has asked me how I knew.

fooled by randomness…lol

If this doesn’t define an example of apophenia….
////Six months of logging shuffles later, Ore still hasn’t caught the ghost in his machine. But the hunt has made him even more sure that “shuffle” doesn’t quite mean “random”:\\\

This from the book of Toli re writings:
///….an organizing principle to what were often cacophonous outpourings.\\\

Why not with songs?

Here’s an example of the essence of what I do:

Girl From Ipanema (Astrid Gilberto version)
Blue Pacific
Dragonfly Summer

See the image? A girl, the beach, summer?
Too much symmetry for me so the final sequence looks like this:

Girl From Ipanema
Blue Pacific
Long Slow Distance
Dragonfly Summer

Why three Michael Franks songs? That is enough and I am ready to move on to another artist/sequence .

The sequences are asymmetrical – not all the sequences are pictorial I might have (in the genre rock – American) sequences somewhat chronological. For example: genre rock – American – 60’s – love songs – Jefferson Starship.

Also avoid tempo symmetry among sequences as much as possible

Each disc is 14 hours long and I mostly don’t remember which sequence is next, but once in the sequence, memory and imagery flow….

Happy to share a boring spreadsheet with anyone who cares to do more data analysis.

My discs are superior to randomness b/c they are ‘thematic’ serendipity arranged chronologically and punctuated with asymmetric tempo changes

wish me luck ….I’m starting the book of Toli

I’ve read it – excellent insights for stock traders

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”.

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

Apophenia: In psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things. Apophenia can be a normal phenomenon or an abnormal one, as in paranoid schizophrenia when the patient sees ominous patterns where there are none.