Friday, July 27, 2007

Cycles and charts

For the analytical, here's an essay on Kress Cycles in Safe Haven.

This, together with Kondratieff cycles and other patterns used by market chart-interpreters, has one flaw to my not-quite-so-mathematical mind: predicting human behaviour involves feedback loops. If I secretly write down what I think you're going to do tomorrow, I could be right every time; but if I reveal my thoughts to you, that changes the situation. It's a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle: to observe is to be involved, and therefore part of the nexus of causes.

Having said that, human behaviour does have patterns, and I believe some have theorised that the growth of our brains is in response to the competition to predict the other person's behaviour better than he can predict yours.

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