The Jolly Contrarian

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Newsletter cribnotes
{{a|devil|{{catbox|newsletter draft}}}}Newsletter crib-notes
====In progress====
*[[Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world]]
*[[Contract and tort as finite and infinite games]]
*[[VAR as a metaphor for litigation]]
*[[Working from home]]
*[[The domestication of law]]
*[[Data modernism]]
*[[ABS field guide]]
*[[System redundancy]]
*[[Legal evolution]]
*[[Party A and Party B]]
*[[A swap as a loan]]
*[[When variation margin attacks]]
====More on averagarianism and customer surveys====
Customer surveys are a kind of self-serving averagarianism. To ask online subscribers "how satisfied are you with the quality of the Times’ journalism” on a five point scale from “extremely satisfied” to “extremely dissatisfied” asks the user to construct some sort of ad hoc blended average of the quality of all the writing in the paper, whereas it inevitably varies between departments, between writers, topics, articles, and even days of the week. And that average reflects the priorities and values of the individual readers, who are not the same. Some might buy the times —and therefore judge it —  for its sports coverage, others for the comment, business, politics or cultural coverage, or any combination. The times, we imagine, already knows which subscribers read which articles, so it is not learning anything useful by asking an artificial question, aggregating what are, effectively, responses to different questions, which users are already answering in the affirmative, anyway, because we should presume they buy the paper for the parts they like, and they like the parts they buy the paper for.
 
Nor is there any value in carefully framing questions to drag out specific answers which may play well when presented as a graphic in an investor presentation, but which don't really reflect the customer's real interests or opinions.
===Crisis of confidence in the Western intellectual tradition===
[[Cultural appropriation]] as a backwards way of looking at memetic strength.
 
Basic sense of shame in the western intelligentsia, when in fact  western intelligentsia has (a) created the tools for all this hand-wringing, such as Marxism, critical theory, which grew directly out of the enlightenment tradition and arguably could not have emerged in any other culture (b) painstakingly documented and recorded and studied the indigenous cultures it was supposedly demolishing, giving them the tools for their present revival (c) facilitated the sharing and cultural transmission of its own intelllectual property — including, by the way, the concept of “intellectual property” enabling incredible advances in the standards of living of people all over the world. The remarkable tolerance for new ideas and acceptance of culture
 
===Bowie, bonds and the bloodbath of banking===
Dilemma of banking matching long term liability to short term risks. Making a spread which is the same thing as maintaining a capital buffer comma when your assets cannot go up in value and your liabilities cannot go down. Well evidence in silicon valley bank which locked itself into long-term assets at low interest rates, meaning it had absolutely no upside and significant Downside on them even without credit loss, while it's liabilities were deposits comma being extremely short term, were very sensitive to interest rates and could be withdrawn at the moment's notice. The trick to making the business work is to manage that gap semicolon this as we have seen it's partly a function of treasury competence and partly a function of market confidence petards and black ducks flap around.
 
This is of course hardly new to silicon valley bank and has been the perennial problem with which banks must wrestle. The classic bank lending activity is a mortgage: collateralized, secured over real estate, but long dated and something the bank must commit to for a long period of time stop banks generally fund these mortgages with short dated instruments such as deposits.
 
How to manage that risk? Largely, by diversity on both sides of the ledger. Banks would lend at scale to thousands or hundreds of thousands of homeowners and take deposits, x-scale from thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of depositors. The basic play was that such diversity would give the depositors confidence not to all withdrawal their money at once comma and on the asset side would give the bank confidence that not all homeowners would default on them mortgages at once. It became a matter of actual aerial management; Banks new that some part of its deposit base was liable to withdrawal bracket and deposit); and new that some part of its asset base was liable to default. It didn't need to know which part; it could manage actuarily on the assumption that, say, 5% of a mortgage portfolio might default over a given period.
 
Bank regulators would manage for that risk by requiring banks to hold a level of capital against its mortgage book that more than covered that default rate.
 
Banks grew more sophisticated, as did bank regulation, and different capital ratios might be applied to different trading and banking books based on this actuarial assessment of the embedded risk.
 
But how to manage, actuarily, that embedded risk? How, indeed, to know exactly what it was? As long as this risk was buried in the books of the financial institution there were experts who could model the probabilities based on historical defaults of similar mortgages. It's all very quantitative and analytical. Regulators would scrutinize this actuarial model, because it would determine capital calculations, but other than specific equity analysts, it held little interest outside the institution.
 
 
In essence what are bank risk analyst would be doing was analysing the incidence of defaults over a given economic cycle and extrapolating from that a likely worst case scenario for defaults on the portfolio within a “liquidity period” — the time it would take the bank to foreclose on its loan get out of its risk position.
 
The likelihood of default of course varies through the economic cycle: for most of it, secured lending is very safe: known to value ratios traditionally were not often greater than 70 percent, meaning a bank would be covered for its whole claim in every situation except where the property value dropped more than 30%.  and defaults are almost nil. During stressed parts of the cycle (following financial crashes and so on) that default level can rise to five or possibly ten percent of the portfolio.
 
This meant that even in a stressed situation the great majority of the portfolio was completely safe.
 
But, which 10% was not? Therein the dilemma; therein the problem. Since I don't know which thousand of my 10,000 mortgages will default,<ref>it is a little more complicated than that because collateralized loans almost never recover at a zero value, so that 10% loss might be spread over 30 or 40% of the portfolio, but the principal remains the same for every $10 invested, 9 comes back.</ref> we must apply a capital charge against to ''all'' of them. If only we could know definitively that these 9000 mortgage would not default we could apply a lower capital rating.
 
Needless to say, obviously impossible: one cannot predict the future.
 
Banks head to problems then: long-term liabilities that could stretch over several economic cycles and which were hard to quickly liquidate, and which attracted a hefty capital charge despite, in most times, being relatively safe Investments.
 
Hence the rise of the rating agency: independent Financial experts applying independent models to portfolios and calculating probabilities of default comma from which the rating agencies could derive ratings. Rating methods are of course opaque and in scrutable, but the general idea was that a triple A instrument was unimpeciably safe, and therefore would attract a lower or even zero capital charge)
 
The independent private rating agencies gradually became embedded into the US regulatory system such that what mattered comma more than one's internal appreciation of risk, was the rating that could be applied to one's security. Near line back to our mortgage portfolios and say one has a mortgage portfolio of 10,000 properties of which any could, conceivably, default in a given period. Even in a period of extreme stress perhaps 10% would be likely to default no more.
 
===Music royalties===
This same problem of predictability of future income streams applies in many areas of finance. Credit card receivables, automobile loans, and even songwriting royalties.
 
Imagine you are an otherworldly, androgynous, boundary pushing British musician from the 1970s. Buy the 1990s you have behind you 25 error defining albums and about catalogue of music which has defined a generation of which the JC proudly declares membership. People still listen to your music and you have a healthy forward flow of royalty income. But it's in determinate, and it's in the future. Cash in hand is so much better than cash you may or may not be paid in a year's time.
 
==Rokos short primer==
... Punting on interest rates
 
 
==Hammer of the gods==
When the lender of last resort is a small guy with a dog. What happened to landsbanki and glitnir
 
==The great deposit withdrawals==
==Where are grads going==
 
==Bad apples 2==
Particular the curious recent phenomenon of corporations transmogrify in themselves into moral guardians.
 
There once was a time that corporations harboured no illusions that their role on the planet was the comparatively amoral one of generating returns for their shareholders.
 
Some kind of mandate drift with slippage over the last 20 years which is seen corporations increasingly anxious to project and signal social and political values. These things do not come from shareholders but are generated in the executive.
 
This has created at least three kinds of dissonance
 
1 it is a kind of judgemental overreach whereby corporations feel entitled to impinge on and evaluate the behaviour of their employees outside the parameters of their professional roles.
 
2 is an old kind of dissociation of “the corporation” from the actions of its employees ''inside'' their professional roles. This is the bad apple phenomenon where the corporations manage to control themselves not as perpetrator, examples the Wells Fargo false accounting, and more recently J.P. Morgan’s studied horror at the behaviour of its former investment bank chief executive, a man who the organisation recruited, employed and promoted to its highest offices over 30 years.
 
The third is a dissonance between the public musings of the organisation, particularly in the realms of social justice and ESG, and its actual historical behaviour, which may take in facilitating money laundering, financing terrorism, drugs and and chips, evading tax and assisting clients to evade tax and bracket as per above the food in its own customers on a fairly systematic scale.
 
===2022===
Machines of Loving Grace - John Markoff
Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and Peter Drucker
Whole Earth Catalog
 
[[Blockchain]] and the financialisation of everything. How blockchain commits the daycare fallacy - {{author|David Graeber}}’s debt analysis
 
Superstition → a belief based on a fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck. Actions based on that belief can lead to ’'malign'' outcomes (e.g. ritual sacrifice) benign/neutral outcomes (touching wood, rubbing David Hume’s toe) or a method for undertaking a task you had to do anyway (putting your cricket pads on in a certain order before batting: you have to put your pads on in ''some'' order and neither is (objectively) worse than the other, so from a rationalist perspective the superstition here has no practical effect on the world at all.
 
On the other hand, acting out a superstition can have unintended psychosomatic consequences (my confidence my pads went on in the lucky way may trigger for getting into system 2? - no opportunity cost ... )
CF hubris: missing the humility of acknowledging there's something bigger than all of us out there
pascal’s wager → opportunity cost and importance of psychological safety and community consensus (believing God in Salt Lake City) → modern day superstition netting ESG (motivated irrationality = the livelihoods one can make from believing stupid things
 
Paradigm = system. Explains the multiple paradigms in Kuhn's model ... They are all paradigms - interlocking systems
 
===2021===
Variation margin as source of systemic risk. Would it not be better to manage margin exposure by declining to trade? Thanks do not provide margin on the upside, so that puts a natural cap on on clients preparedness to transact. Thanks still call margin on the downside reflecting at this is fundamentally a lending business and the use of bilateral contracts banks role and regulation and capital is the primary systemic risk mitigant.
 
The interplay with netting being a a giveaway: variation margin + netting = worse xposure
The bilateral nature of ISDA being a great misconception
 
The shitness of netting


===Turtles===
Talking Politics with Adam Curtis


The idea that the truth is in the patterns in the days that human cannot even see.
'''The power of Ignorance''': The most powerful  response to a contrary idea is to ''ignore'' it.


Money as an abstract token of value that has no intrinsic value
“we love automation. We can automating complex things”. WRONG QUESTION DUDE.


Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.
It's structural questions, its new clauses its new schedules. The complexity is mind bending.”
===Robot Nirvana===
Why the emergence of [[artificial intelligence]] that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells less about our future than thought leaders think it does.


{{Quote|''Over The Bridge, a mental health awareness organisation, has created The Lost Tapes Of The 27 Club, a compilation of songs generated by [[AI]]. The four songs mimic the tonal qualities of Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison, imagining what music by the artists were like '''had they not passed away'''.''}}


Have a listen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzn21tX2ykY to the video].<ref>Oddly, the official tracks have been pulled from Spotify and YouTube. </ref> It’s a clever forgery — it’s got the inexpert syncopations, and an amusingly authentic out-of-tune guitar, and Nirvana’s trademark intensity shifts. Not much trace of ''Endless, Nameless'', however. But play it back-to-back with ''In Bloom'' and it’s just not the same. For all the power of AI they seem to have co-opted at least a singer and possibly a whole band to record the song, so we’re a significant step away from this really being artificial intelligent. This is more like a cover band recording their own tribute song in the style of Nirvana. Is that going to sell out stadiums worldwide?
Big ideas... Your tech needs to make the process better, bit just accelerate or anaesthetise existing process


Now this is not to deny music AI is impressive: it is ''stunning''. The AI drummer on Apple’s ''Logic Pro'' is indistinguishable from a real human, and adapts to the music it accompanies. Amplitube’s amplifier emulation can accurately replicate vintage ampliers, mic placements, cabinets, and room acoustics. Izotope’s mastering plugins and mix and master your music to sound, should you desire it, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The technology is genuinely amazing — it ''far'' outstrips any [[reg tech]] in financial services — and really is putting folks out of work/bringing professional studio technology in the hands of [[Dangerboy|talentless amateurs]] (delete as applicable).
Contracts and processes as formal and informal structures in systems


But the implied promise here isn’t “technical emulation” but redundancy of humans altogether in the creative process. The futurologists are over their skis here. Can [[artificial intelligence]] give us the music Kurt Cobain was going to give the world had he not died? No. ''Of course'' it can’t. Even logically, this is barking mad: the guy shot himself. There is a path-dependency problem here: Cobain could not make any more music, so whatever a machine can come up with, however brilliant, ''it could not be that''. It would be something different. It would be ''some other process'' trying to imitate Nirvana.
Claryllis


And we don’t need AI to do that: AI just makes it cheaper and easier. However good these processes may be, it is never the same. Just ask the surviving members of Pink Floyd.
Ricky, listen, maybe, maybe death wasn’t the right word, I meant you know, he's still here, Ricky, he 's still here, he still exists in the [[space time continuum]]. The way it works is like when he's ceased to be, he actually turned into a different type of energy — [[space-time continuum]] — and the way the universe up there, the black holes and everything, they wrap around, there’s [[string theory]], that can prove that different things, that he can live here in the [[space-time continuum]], I mean that’s how the universe works, Ricky, black holes and thermodynamics can fold over time space like that so he's actually still, existing.


===== The Dark Side of the Wall =====
logical undecidability of libertariaism. John highs example of the right to choose which side of the road to drive on.
In 1993 there had not been a Pink Floyd album of any kind for six years, and there hadn’t been a ''good'' one for fourteen. The Machine — you know, the one Pink Floyd welcomed us to in 1975 — judged the mood of the record-buying public, which tends to buy Pink Floyd records regardless of what they are like, and concluded it was time for a new one.  
*Average being comprised of individuals. There is no magic, no emergence from the average. Just because cour category performs, on average, differently to another category doesn't mean you perform differently to him.
*Categories are as hoc and non-exclusive. The Simpson paradox
*The category error
*That guy
*Opportunity cost


But, problem: other than through their [[legal eagle]]<nowiki/>s, band members were not talking to each other. Lyricist Roger Waters had walked out over a decade earlier, and there was no chance of him coming back. What to do?  In 1994, using AI to emulate the band’s recorded output wasn’t really on the cards. The remaining members did it the hard way. They pulled off a fair approximation. Without Waters, guitarist David Gilmour had his wife, an author, contribute lyrics. Beautifully recorded and redolent of the band’s signature crystalline guitar solos, swampy organs and moody synth pads, ''The Division Bell'' went straight to number 1 in the UK and the US, eventually selling something like 10,000,000 worldwide.
Dear lord and father of mankind is the back end of a poem written during a hallucinogenic trip brought on by drinking Soma in some vedic ritual: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Brewing_of_Soma


''The Division Bell'' ''sounded'' like Pink Floyd. It was recognisably the same product. But it emulated old ideas, recycled old tropes, tried to recapture the glorious seventies. There was nothing new in it. It went nowhere. It did not develop. It could not anticipate where Roger Waters might have taken the vision, because Waters wasn’t there to give that impetus. One critic posted a one-line review which captured the problem exactly:
Soma was a sacred ritual drink in Vedic religion, going back to Proto-Indo-Iranian times (ca. 2000 BC), possibly with hallucinogenic properties.


“''Wish You Were An Animal On The Dark Side Of The Wall''”.


Waters still tours ''The Wall''. No-one tours ''The Division Bell''. Psychologically, no-one wants a facsimile, a reimagining or a rehash, however much effort one goes to to achieve it.
{{modernism versus pragmatism}}


===== It’s musical backtesting =====
==Psychology in negotiating==
In a way ''The Division Bell'' was a good analogue to Nirvana by AI: it is not a development of the artist: it is a recombination of ''old'' records, put together in a way ''that Kurt Cobain didn’t''. We know the artistic choices Cobain made, and they weren’t these ones. They’re the ones that ended up on ''Nevermind''. If the object is to emulate someone that we no longer have, and we are reassembling existing parts that Kurt Cobain left behind, then unless we submit them exactly as Cobain would have — as he ''did'' — then our recombination must be inferior.
Why you should call call before writing.


So, as a recombination its an inferior. If we expect an extrapolation of where Nirvana might go next, [[Artificial Intelligence|artificial intelligence]] has is no chance. It is not magic. It cannot see into the future or reconstruct dependent paths which did not happen. Given that Cobain’s path stopped abruptly in 1994, it is impossible to deduce what he might have been writing about in 1995. We cannot reconstruct that: it is no more effective than any kind of [[backtesting]].
If you wanted to persuade someone of a a course of action, wouldn't you you first explain it to them?


Who knows what Cobain would be singing about had he not died? Perhaps he would have discovered a tantric yoga and spent a month in a commune in Bangor. Perhaps ''In Utero'' would have been composed on sitar. Maybe it would have been rubbish. We don’t, and, ''cannot'' know.
What works better, a pitch or a deck?


And pop stars, being human, ''do'' preposterous things like decamping to spiritual retreats in Wales. The Beatles did. Consider: what kind of technology could take ''Please Please Me'', ''With The Beatles'' and ''A Hard Day’s Night'' and generate anything resembling ''Rubber Soul'', let alone ''Sergeant Pepper'' or ''The White Album''.  
Standard operating practice amongst professional negotiators is to proceed almost entirely in written form. There are a few selfish grounds for doing so: firstly it's a bit like pre preparing a performance. You don't need to be perfect, you don't need to react to to expected turns of events, and you have time to prepare the perfect answer.


Creatives: you’re not out of a job yet.
Calling and debating live requires confidence, preparedness, and a greater command of the technical material over which you are negotiating. This is intimidating . Effective interpersonal communication also requires empathy, psychology and wit: these are are skills one generally acquires with experience and and expertise and they are generally not available from school leavers in Bucharest operating with a PlayBook on their lap.


=== It’s not about the music ===
So negotiators have evolved away of operating which best suits they are degree of skill and experience, and more or less guarantees and ongoing stream of work. The the orderly, leisurely, thorough exchange of correspondence. One can ensure all boxes are ticked, or processes followed, without tension comic conflict unexpected crisis or or risk of inadvertent error.
The importance of [[authenticity]]. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo?


The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine.
The cost is is the speed and waste it generates as an a inevitable by-product. The unnecessary trials of correspondence. The waiting, the over detailed drafting as each side tries to unpick the others goal. All of this can be circumvented by direct conversation.


The segues into a conversation about the meaning of value. The same way that meaning does not exist in the words on a page, value does not exist in in the technical performance of a skill, but lies somewhere between the performer and and it's audience. Similarly, science is not simply demarcation of the correct answers to questions, but is demarcation of the correct questions requiring answers. This is a dynamic. It is complex in the technical sense, the ground rules are approximate and shift without warning based on the attitudes of the conversants.
Yes; this means having skilled negotiators and they are expensive. But avoiding that is a false economy.


Leaving aside all the overpowering psychological reasons not to value an AI version of Pink Floyd, there is the bluntly practical one.  They can only ever be a flawless moment it can recombine existing elements into a new you form. But it cannot create genuinely new you output because it is not the artist. Whatever the machine comes up with it will not be what nirvana's ''next'' album was going to be. Of course, we cannot know that, but consider an AI algorithm directed at The Beatles first four albums. Is there any chance it could have devised music resembling that on revolver or rubber soul let alone tough White album or sergeant pepper's? An AI analysing Pablo honey and The bends will not produce amnesiac or kid A.
===Nepotism and networks of trust===
Is nepotism the problem or is it lack of networks of trust? When when the bosses nephew gets that plum job, what is the value in it of the the credibility signal sent by the boss. I vouch for this person full stop my reputation is at stake if he he fails. In recommending him to you I have skin in the game.


===Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally===
By looking at at these arrangements purely from the perspective of unfair advantage and privileged access that they undoubtedly also have, we miss a trick. But it is true that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and deprived areas have much less opportunity of this kind. But if these reinforcing social vouching systems have value, and it seems that they do (otherwise privileged would not use them), then is not the answer to look for ways of constructing these vouchers systems amongst children who would otherwise not have them.
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?


===[[Critical theory]], [[post-modernism]], [[modernism]] and the death of objective truth===
Many corporations have relationships with inner-city schools, for example, which run summer internships and similar programs. These are fantastic opportunities to create relationships of trust and recommendation. This is what networks like LinkedIn are basically designed to achieve. But are there other similar systems question mark if not, how could we invent them? Raising levels of trust in a community, however that is done, is clearly of value to the whole community.
Most conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth. Some are completely true. There has to be something for the credulous people to glom onto. The conspiracy theory of our time is critical theory


[[Critical theory]]’s grain of truth, ironically, is that ''there is no truth''.  This is its debt to post-modernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept. Those on the right — {{author|Douglas Murray}}’s {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} is an articulate example — and the left


The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.
==Turtles==
Talking Politics with Adam Curtis


The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher Hitchens, {{author|Richard Dawkins}}, {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}, {{author|Douglas Murray}} and recently {{author|Matthew Syed}}) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just ''are'' true. No amount of identifying with an alternative theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window.
The idea that the truth is in the patterns in the days that human cannot even see.


On the other hand [https://www.city-journal.org/american-campus-as-a-factory Jacob Howland] made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has [[critical theory]] escape its [[postmodern]] origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the [[high modernist]]s who inhabit an intellectual world that seeks to solve all problems by top-down taxonomies and computation.
Money as an abstract token of value that has no intrinsic value


{{quote|''An illiberal alliance of technological corporatism and progressivism is rapidly turning universities into a “talent pipeline” for the digital age. When fully constructed, this pipeline will deliver a large and steady flow of human capital, packaged in certifiable skill sets and monetised in social-impact or “pay-for-success” bonds. But the strongly particular or eccentric shapes of mind, character, and taste that make human beings, as John Stuart Mill says, “a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” would clog the talent pipeline.''}}
Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.


Critical theory has escaped its usual confines in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using their rationalist framework to advance what is a fairly radical political agenda. [[Critical theory]] is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has ''displaced'' them altogether and is making its own arrogant assumptions in their place.
=== Authenticity ===
The importance of [[authenticity]]. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo?


That's not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another.
The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine.


The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not ''false'' (that would be a paradox right?) So much as ''incoherent''. It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language.
The segues into a conversation about the meaning of value. The same way that meaning does not exist in the words on a page, value does not exist in in the technical performance of a skill, but lies somewhere between the performer and and it's audience. Similarly, science is not simply demarcation of the correct answers to questions, but is demarcation of the correct questions requiring answers. This is a dynamic. It is complex in the technical sense, the ground rules are approximate and shift without warning based on the attitudes of the conversants.


And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition.
Leaving aside all the overpowering psychological reasons not to value an AI version of Pink Floyd, there is the bluntly practical one. They can only ever be a flawless moment it can recombine existing elements into a new you form. But it cannot create genuinely new you output because it is not the artist. Whatever the machine comes up with it will not be what nirvana's ''next'' album was going to be. Of course, we cannot know that, but consider an AI algorithm directed at The Beatles first four albums. Is there any chance it could have devised music resembling that on revolver or rubber soul let alone tough White album or sergeant pepper's? An AI analysing Pablo honey and The bends will not produce amnesiac or kid A.


The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright.
===Allegory, fairy stories and the hubris of taking things literally===
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?


If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence comma for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and itself true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics and perhaps science. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language something Colin from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete semicolon and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe. We haven't solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherence we have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it.
{{Critical theory, modernism and the death of objective truth}}


Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time I’m are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations.


The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective.


===Power structures are all around us===
===Power structures are all around us===
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