We are using math to fool ourselves.  You don’t have to look far to see abuse of formulas and we are seeingimage this with some big math projects as again the incentive is there to “sell you a formulas that can make nonsense believable”…”the perfect butt” example is great…but think about this and the similarities you see out there in one article after another when journalists interview a data base and create “national news”…”it must be real because it has a square root in the formula”..”just the fact that the formula exists makes it believable and worth media attention” ..”numerical nonsense is everywhere”…watch the entire video in the footer..

This is what worries me now with the mounting news use of “content farms” to where an algorithm is programmed to read studies and interpret the the numbers…once it is done with a “formula” it becomes national news and gets media attention. 

Just the fact that a formula exists seems to be enough today no matter how stupid or what nonsense it states professor Siefe states.  Here’s another good article from Felix Salmon..”Why quants don’t know everything”..

“Once quants disrupt an industry, they often don’t know when to stop—and they create systems that encourage cheating.  So let’s celebrate the value of disruption by data—but let’s not forget that data isn’t everything.”

I know right now everyone is in a race to get your attention and I’m not picking on the journalists by any means as they have click and stats they have to meet so they have to play the game and again having “content farms” invade and play along with the news is something else that we have to look at as far as what we are getting.  I’m running away from a lot of it myself and they keep pouring more on.  I do appreciate good journalist news and investigative reports, my favorites but this other entity party due to news agencies trying to make and not lose money is being tried as a cheap effort.  Some of it can be good but as with everything it will be oversold for what it can do.  Here’s another short clip from Mike Osinski…you can solve anything with software and by the way he’s the one who wrote the software that all the banks used and abused for sub prime loans.  Watch the entire Quant video in the footer.  We are still constrained by the real world. 

And this is the attitude we see on both Wall Street and in the Silicon Valley, (video clip below) Mike Osinski again and you can imagine he felt some of this watching his software work, but again if you watch the entire video below you can also hear his disappointment in what occurred and how the pressure go to where he didn’t even know what day it was “as you can’t be wrong. When you are close to the money it’s like a drug and “you think you are a genius and you are just so much better than anyone else”, you are isolated from the real world who is struggling to pay the mortgage and keep food on the table. 

So this is what is happening out there from a couple angles and it all has to do with money and ethics get theimage back seat here for us 99% for sure.  So this is my concern for the news content for next year in how much of the content will be tweaked to “serve us what those who write code think we should see”…scary but it’s going that way as Forbes already has a “journalist bot” that goes to the web and write news articles and interviews data bases to present the value as it has been programmed to see with machine learning.  By the way Forbes media is for sale and they are trying to get some money of course for the time they took to develop it.  They are not alone with this type of automation as someone else developed software than can write books..the patent and information about the 100,000 books written can be found here…as any kind of content can be broken down into a formula and it comes with templates and is designed to avoid plagiarism…here’s how it works in the video…

Algorithmic Journalism

Mind boggling on what’s appearing out there …and where the news is going with automation.  Again I still want humans when it comes to news as I am human looking other human input.  This brings me to this link and an essay worth reading “On Being a Skeptic”..and there’s many more than me that see this coming, I just happen to want to talk about it and help explain where I can.  These are the irresistible formulas that captures the media.  BD 

“On Being a Data skeptic- Modelers Have A Bigger Responsibility Now Than Ever Before”–A Must Read Essay, Start “Sniffing the Data”…

http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/12/getting-health-insurance-in-us-has.html

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