good and evil

enlightened
how to get people to do evil:

• mindlessly taking the first small step down the road to evil
  

• dehumanization of others

• de-individuation of self (anonymity)

• diffusion of personal responsibility

• blind obedience to authority

• uncritical conformity to group norms

• passive tolerance of evil (inaction, indifference)

watch philip zimbardo's (the stanford prison experiment guy) ted talk:

the cause of the financial crisis..

unimpressed
how did a housing crisis become a financial crisis, ending up as an economic crisis?

how come highly trained professionals didn't see it coming?

a nice simple summary visualizing all the subprime mortgage, CDO, CDS, leverage, tranching, rating, AAA, default, frozen credit market stuff:


at the barebones level, wired magazine gives insight into the core mechanism in their article Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street.

the culprit:

the gaussian copula function

basically a quantity measuring the correlation (preciser: the dependence structure) of two random variables.

"the corporate CDO world relied almost exclusively on this copula-based correlation model."
"everyone was pinning their hopes on house prices continuing to rise."

the idea, published in 2000, quickly became a metric quants ubiquitously used to evaluate risk and a cornerstone of financial engineering allowing simple modeling of vastly complex risks. particularly default risks of CDO tranches. until august 2007...

the ideas:

• tame the nasty nature of real-world dynamical, complex and latent variables by substituting them with a clean and simple number summing up everything
• convey an image of what is happening: correlation is more like a constant than a fluctuating variable and all you need to know and compute
  
• let the method be adopted by investors, banks, rating agencies and regulators
  
• ignore any warning signs (for instance d. sornette in 2006: "this recurrent use [of gaussian copulas] has been ratified by the recommendations of the BIS concerning credit risk modelling. however, there are many indicators suggesting that this [...] approach may be grossly inadequate to account for large credit risks [...]." pg. 138)
  
• let everyone make a lot of money
• let quants forget about the concrete reality behind the math and crank up the models
• let managers, lacking formal math skills, execute transactions worth trillions of dollars based on the models
  
• forget about the underlying magic that makes it all work: a decade of soaring housing prices
• lend money to people without jobs and income
  
• be surprised when everything blows up in your face
  

cartoon from cagle.com

--
update 28th of june 2010:

who cares?

mood: more bewilderment and head-shaking
is the human brain big enough to save one of the most intelligent creatures? greenpeace asks cynically in an add, aiming at banning whaling amongst other ocean related concerns.

when i mention i'm vegetarian in restaurants, a frequent response is to point me in the direction of the fish...


greenpeace campaign

fact i: the ocean is humanities last frontier of ignorance

• 72% of earth's surface covered by sea
• 97% of the ocean is unexplored
• with one yearly NASA budget, the exploration program of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) could be funded for 1600 years
• largest mountain range covering 23% of earth's surface area underwater (visited for the 1st time after the moon in 1973)
• coral reefs still unexplored between 60 and 150 meters
• there are better maps of mars than the 50% of total US territory which lies under the sea
• most of the southern hemisphere's underwater terrain is unexplored (more exploration ships in that region during captain cook's times than today)
• the seabed is harboring countless well preserved archaeological artifacts
• underwater hot springs are basically commercial grade heavy metals deposits
• underwater volcanoes are emitting methane

fact ii: the oceans are teeming with life

• although most of the ocean does not get exposed to photons from the sun, and hence there is no photosynthesis, it is completely erroneous to not expect life
• the antarctic sea is, unexpectedly and only recently discovered, teeming with marine life
• hydrothermal vent systems are islands of life
• bacteria replicating photosynthesis in the dark by chemosynthesis where accidental discovery as no one ever predicted their existence
• resilient bacteria living in ph 11 environments
• 7 new species found per hour of deep reef exploration
• 2000 to 2500 estimated new species in the indo-pacific ocean alone (vs. 5000-6000 known species)
  
• not only new species are still being discovered, but also new behavior and new ecology
• amazing variety of bioluminescent animals
  

fact iii: the seas are being destroyed at breakneck speed

• 90% of all big fish have disappeared in the last 100 years
• 50% of all coral reefs are destroyed
• for 1kg of fish ending up in a market, at least 10kg of bycatch was killed and thrown away
• 1.7% of the blue whale population is remaining
• 10% of the tuna fish population is remaining
• commercial trawlers are forced to access ever deeper seabed due to the depletion of fisheries; this completely destroys potential habitats which are totally unexplored and eradicates possibly unknown species
• throwaway plastic accumulating in the sea (half of the 100 billion pounds of plastic pellets a year are made into throwaway plastic produces of which a large fraction ends up in the sea)
• 100000 albatross chicks in remote habitats dying from stomachs filled with plastic trash
• some ocean water samples contain more plastic than plankton
• plastic debris concentrate pollutants and become "poison pills"
• these are been eaten by many fish at the bottom of the food chain
• gigantic garbage patches in the pacific and atlantic
  

Sylvia Earle's moving (and prizewinning) TED talk:


Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean's hidden worlds


Captain Charles Moore on the seas of plastic


Richard Pyle: Exploring the reef's Twilight Zone


David Gallo fascinating TED talk:


update 20.04.2010:
Edith Widder: Glowing life in an underwater world


update 05.05.2010:


update 02.06.2010:
Brian Skerry reveals ocean's glory -- and horror


update june 30th 2010:


update july 12 2010:


update july 27 2010:

messages from banksy

mood: respectful
"people who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine"

"sometimes i feel so sick at the state of the world i can't even finish my second apple pie"

"the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.
it's people who follow orders who drop bombs and massacre villages.
as a precaution to ever committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we're told. this is the only way we can be sure"

"it takes a lot of guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in - like peace and justice and freedom"

"we can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles; in the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves"

"people who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one"

"a lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to"


banksy is a british graffiti artist. he has reached international fame notably for stunts like:

• hanging a picture he painted (depicting mona lisa with a yellow smiley face) in the louvre
• or painting images on the israeli west bank wall showing, for instance, a girl being blown away by holding on to flying balloons
• or spraying "this is not a photo opportunity" on certain well-known photograph spots around the world
  
• or painting official looking signs on white walls reading "this wall is a designated graffiti area" and documenting the progress of tags and graffitis being created there by other street artists.

hollywood celebrities have purchased his art and one piece was auctioned for over half a million usd in 2007. he responded to a sotheby’s sale of his work by posting a painting on his website featuring people bidding for a picture, with the caption "i can't believe you morons actually buy this shit."

his view of life is anti-authoritarian, anti-war, anti-consumerist and anti-establishment, using very strong imagery for his pictures. his messages are often ironic, cynical, very to the point and critical comments on the current zeitgeist.

his true identity is unknown...

sources: webpage, wikipedia, wall and piece.

quotes of the day...

mood: bewilderment
sometimes, psychology (wishful thinking, denial, cognitive bias, blind spots, ideology, ...) is stronger than intelligence.

alan greenspan's comments on the financial/economic crisis:

I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I was going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.

source oversight.house.gov.

the worst of two worlds

mood: disgusted
reading the daily news can at times be quite a depressing experience. psychological protective mechanisms maintaining the mind's sanity can vary from cynicism over callousness to denial, etc. and so most news events don't cause any lasting effects...

apart from "normal" global tragedies as war, genocide, poverty, famine, opression, species extinction, catastrophic climate change events, etc. and the current ludicrous financial and economic crisis, in the last years the cannibalistic activities of Armin Meiwes and the horrific ordeals of Natascha Kampusch and Elisabeth Fritzl have been particularly shocking.

today the list can be extended by another unfathomable abomination. the titles of the articles read:

• Link between child porn and Muslim terrorists discovered in police raids
• Dangerous and depraved: paedophiles unite with terrorists online
  

From the content:

A link between terrorism plots and hardcore child pornography is becoming clear after a string of police raids in Britain and across the Continent.

During a crackdown on the mosque, police were astonished to discover pornography on computer hard drives. But what was not reported then was that the haul included images of children being sexually abused that were encoded with messages as a clandestine method of communication.

on the one hand, there is (in my opinion) the worst acts of destruction sentient beings can perform: systematically abuse the most fragile members of the society for pleasure. contaminate the cradle of future generations. personally i don't understand why there has been no global uproar, as the victims of child abuse become younger and younger and the atrocities worse and worse (some statistics), calling for a coordinated international effort to stop such and related activities (like female genital mutilation, child labour, ...).

and on the other hand, people driven by ideology to kill certain other people with different ideologies are using these unspeakable crimes as a vehicle for their own means of spreading death, destruction and suffering...

deep insights into the abyss of the human soul...

:-(

activism, anarchy and fun

mood: party on

from the 4th to the 6th of july 2008, hundreds of activists from the zurich squatter and left alternative scene occupied the old football stadium hardturm, to celebrate a weekend of fun, partying and anarchy.

after an initial clash with the police on friday evening, the security forces said they would tolerate the event, as long as the stadium is cleared by sunday.

offering such a platform in zurich, being known for it's active party culture, attracted a few thousand party goers by saturday, as the message of the event spread like wildfire...

this has been the third major event of the organizers in the last years, where for a couple of days all effective rules and regulations were suspended, and an alternative subculture asserted itself for a couple of days.

the event was lively reported on by all the swiss mainstream media.

view photos in the brotäktschen set on my flicker account.

visit the "official" website of the organizers: raumpflege.org

More info: indymedia, nzz, tagesanzeiger.