Computational statistics -OR - identity, ego and self-esteem (BUT NOT MINE!)
22 02 2009My A2 computing project involves downloading stock prices and related news and showing it in a VB6-made executable. Most of the work is actually getting VB to co-operate with filetypes and graphing modules and whatnot, but it does raise some questions (or maybe I just randomly raised them). Mr Barker explained that Charlie Paterson’s algorithm for predicting trends involved inspecting the last five (or some similar number) changes in price and then looking back for a bunch of five similarly-sized consecutive changes and seeing what the sixth change was and then predicting that that sixth change would happen this time around. It sounded quite interesting to me but apparently it was rather unsuccessful. My dad mentioned “trend-following” ones that predict the price will go down if it’s gone down the last n times. The smaller n is, the more “sensitive” the thing is - obviously if n is 1, it’ll just predict the last change which is probably around 50% useful… but the larger n is, the more “behind the trend” you’ll be when you pick it up.
I kind of dream of fitting polynomials to the last 100 data points or something - maybe this would help predict minima and maxima as well? I think someone once mentioned Fourier analysis of the stock market to me, years and years ago… … … I don’t know. Sounds very interesting.
Then I started thinking in very general terms - think about the deterministic universe idea that if you know its initial state, you can predict its whole future. Obviously you wouldn’t expect to be able to predict the entire progress of the stock market from its initial state (!) because not only is it externally-influenced, it’s completely controlled by external forces. Now, if we could model the behaviour of lots and lots of investors…
:)
I’m going to try to have a look at some stats/compsci mashups when I have the change.
The second part of this high-variance post is about some probably useless things that I’ve been thinking about. In a culture of mass consumption (blah blah) perhaps we slide towards defining ourselves through what we buy etc. … perhaps this is unavoidable, but I hope it’s understandable (in some sense). What I’ve been worrying about is the idea of being not just emotionally invested in endeavours and inanimate items (or even other people) but really, really relying on external things for validation. Maybe it’s insane to think you can fuel yourself - maybe that’s a microneurosis of my own, the belief that someone can function alone - but sometimes it seems insane to think that your environment totally controls you and you are just living “in reaction” to the world. I chanced upon the print version of this article, possibly exaggeratedly (I’m not very good at reading between lines etc.) mocking Twitter users’ need for constant attention/validation… its criticisms seem to ring true in some sense… … I suppose everyone who tries to maximise their “connectability” (*cough, shuffle*) is guilty of trying to “feel alive” by connecting to stuff. Is that bad? Possibly.
I think there must be an optimum point between being {selfish, obstinate, unreactive} and {personalityless, fickle, reactive}. Some particularly cool people seem to just settle near this optimum while others like myself flounder in a state of extreme self-consciousness, spewing a narrative of the slightly odd journey as they (I…) go. I’d like to think I’m slowly migrating towards a healthy emotional state - I’m definitely very happy but it feels a little bit fragile, like if I hit my head and was paralysed and couldn’t do any maths or guitar or exercise anymore I would become depressed. I don’t want that kind of mental breakdown to be possible ever.
What of the idea that one’s ego and one’s self-esteem aren’t the same, and that one’s ego is a big rationalisation (”I’m Farhan, I go to a good school, I have {some skills}, I’m a sexy beast” and one’s self-esteem is one’s natural will to survive? In that case, some people will be successful in maintaining their ego and have that at their core and let their self-esteem wither and with good luck will remain happy for their lives and be so confident that they can be happy that they will always somehow manufacture the situation necessary to reinforce their ego and assure them that they are a functioning life-form. I suspect that these people, if confronted by a terrible accident, would “lose it”, so to speak. Because their ego generally works for them and the world has tricked them into believing that “that is the way happiness works”, they never confront the strange damage that has taken place to their self-esteem as a result of the way modern human civilisation plays itself out.
On the other hand, cool mofos who have worked to genuinely improve themselves as people (I don’t mean in a “LOL LERN NEW SKILLZ” but in a “understand what it means to be human and not a robot or an animal or a brick”) and have avoided or got wise to the hidden and never-discussed subtle, indirect and psychological pitfalls of consumerism have their bodies compeltely crippled by fate and respond amazingly well.
I suspect/hope that for the majority of people, this works itself out - as they “mature” they somehow “find themselves”, some later than others. Fun.
So much/many lulz! countable(lulz)?
Pax
EDIT:
The obvious thing of taking the mean change for the last five and extrapolating is probably ill-fated, so I asked my dad about weighting the means so the ones closer are much more important. I thought that was quite nifty. He laughed in my face and suggested that I read up about the tremendous amount of stuff that’s been done and about how complex and, occasionally, effective it was. Interesting…
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