Compared to (say) financial astrology in support of underlying-value-based trading, divination in support of technical trading might be more subject to the principles that cause backlashes or other negative effects reported from magic to get money out of nowhere, win lotteries, or win game shows by luck. To avoid these effects, you may need to find certain deep threads of meaning in how securities markets work and make those threads sufficiently central to your trading practice.
Securities markets can cause more wealth to exist in the future than would otherwise exist, by efficiently allocating things like resources, capital, labor, and shareholder voting attention, and providing legible and reduced-risk prices for making decisions about future production tradeoffs. Securities markets do this mostly by creating an economic mechanism where people who change an existing allocation or set of price signals in a better direction tend to get some of the wealth thereby caused, incentivizing them and making them more able to have such influence in the future, and people who would tend to change allocations or price signals in a worse direction tend to have less wealth afterwards and are less in a position to have such effects in the future. So, insofar as that theory works in practice, securities markets are distinct from things like lotteries.
Two weeks ago there was a discussion of someone who did do something in relation to lotteries, but it was okay because they weren't very invested in winning and their intention was that the winner be the person who needed the money, and if they won they donated the results to charity:
The potential effects here are mixed. The supernatural effect is to make the "market" more efficient and wealth-producing in terms of people's personal circumstances. But there's still all the overhead of running the lottery that isn't really producing value as such. And, off to the side of this interaction across the lottery, there's still all the other people in the lottery losing money on the basis of false hopes, and those people's avoidable suffering and incremental ruin. Further up that thread, JMG says: "It's been my experience that when people play the lottery in anything but the most casual way their lives grind to a halt and any luck they might have had trickles away. That's true of any attempt to get something for nothing, but lotteries seem worse than most."
So, if you focus less on questions like "are these stock movements over the next little while going to be the equivalent of a winning lottery number?" and more on questions like "would my making this trade cause more wealth to be produced directly, and would that wealth go toward the right people?", you should be more protected from the negative effects of trying to make yourself one of the people that wealth goes toward.
If you do much applied math, one way to get a conceptual feel for this current of wealth-production-increasingness is to think about the gradients of the cost-to-go in a hypothetical optimal control problem describing all the variables in the market across time. (If you do much deep learning, this is sort of like the backpropagated derivatives of a deep network's performance, except instead of network layers it's points in time.)
Of course, the price signal structure in a market economy is only partially aligned with the interests and well-being of humans or other beings: market entities usually also represent concentrations of the usual incentives to profit in disregard of harmful externalities, subvert laws, keep people in the dark so they'll buy craved semblances instead of fulfilling substances, capture regulators, consolidate to get alpha from risk-buffering in a way that compounds advantages against smaller entities, and so on. For that matter, even just the goal of having more wealth is itself only partially aligned with human interests and well-being. So after magic that gets you wading sufficiently deep into the current of wealth-transferring effects of a securities market, eventually you would want to include balancing effects. But then, of course, there's still a reason why activities and people are specialized toward particular distinct purposes.
Another thing about markets, is, normally, there's a bit of a fight between market participants who did some of the groundwork to make wealth producible, to make sure they're the one the resulting wealth goes to. For example, if two sufficiently capitalized traders do the same analysis of fundamentals on an obscure company, the one who makes the corrective trade first is the only one who gets the money. That's partly a directly useful, meritocratic effect (that trade happening sooner is slightly better for everyone else, and people who aren't likely to be first shouldn't expend the effort) and partly a sort of necessity of the system (people shouldn't depend on castle-in-the-air schemes that make the market pay out in unsustainable ways, even if it would be "fairer" risk-wise). I don't understand what principles govern potential negative effects of divination to win that kind of contest, other than to say that it seems like a Martial situation.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-07 07:55 pm (UTC)Securities markets can cause more wealth to exist in the future than would otherwise exist, by efficiently allocating things like resources, capital, labor, and shareholder voting attention, and providing legible and reduced-risk prices for making decisions about future production tradeoffs. Securities markets do this mostly by creating an economic mechanism where people who change an existing allocation or set of price signals in a better direction tend to get some of the wealth thereby caused, incentivizing them and making them more able to have such influence in the future, and people who would tend to change allocations or price signals in a worse direction tend to have less wealth afterwards and are less in a position to have such effects in the future. So, insofar as that theory works in practice, securities markets are distinct from things like lotteries.
Two weeks ago there was a discussion of someone who did do something in relation to lotteries, but it was okay because they weren't very invested in winning and their intention was that the winner be the person who needed the money, and if they won they donated the results to charity:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/241113.html?thread=42219993#cmt42233049
The potential effects here are mixed. The supernatural effect is to make the "market" more efficient and wealth-producing in terms of people's personal circumstances. But there's still all the overhead of running the lottery that isn't really producing value as such. And, off to the side of this interaction across the lottery, there's still all the other people in the lottery losing money on the basis of false hopes, and those people's avoidable suffering and incremental ruin. Further up that thread, JMG says: "It's been my experience that when people play the lottery in anything but the most casual way their lives grind to a halt and any luck they might have had trickles away. That's true of any attempt to get something for nothing, but lotteries seem worse than most."
So, if you focus less on questions like "are these stock movements over the next little while going to be the equivalent of a winning lottery number?" and more on questions like "would my making this trade cause more wealth to be produced directly, and would that wealth go toward the right people?", you should be more protected from the negative effects of trying to make yourself one of the people that wealth goes toward.
If you do much applied math, one way to get a conceptual feel for this current of wealth-production-increasingness is to think about the gradients of the cost-to-go in a hypothetical optimal control problem describing all the variables in the market across time. (If you do much deep learning, this is sort of like the backpropagated derivatives of a deep network's performance, except instead of network layers it's points in time.)
Of course, the price signal structure in a market economy is only partially aligned with the interests and well-being of humans or other beings: market entities usually also represent concentrations of the usual incentives to profit in disregard of harmful externalities, subvert laws, keep people in the dark so they'll buy craved semblances instead of fulfilling substances, capture regulators, consolidate to get alpha from risk-buffering in a way that compounds advantages against smaller entities, and so on. For that matter, even just the goal of having more wealth is itself only partially aligned with human interests and well-being. So after magic that gets you wading sufficiently deep into the current of wealth-transferring effects of a securities market, eventually you would want to include balancing effects. But then, of course, there's still a reason why activities and people are specialized toward particular distinct purposes.
Another thing about markets, is, normally, there's a bit of a fight between market participants who did some of the groundwork to make wealth producible, to make sure they're the one the resulting wealth goes to. For example, if two sufficiently capitalized traders do the same analysis of fundamentals on an obscure company, the one who makes the corrective trade first is the only one who gets the money. That's partly a directly useful, meritocratic effect (that trade happening sooner is slightly better for everyone else, and people who aren't likely to be first shouldn't expend the effort) and partly a sort of necessity of the system (people shouldn't depend on castle-in-the-air schemes that make the market pay out in unsustainable ways, even if it would be "fairer" risk-wise). I don't understand what principles govern potential negative effects of divination to win that kind of contest, other than to say that it seems like a Martial situation.