Electives - Lectures 2

Lectures 5&6

The first lecture from Mark Fisher was on capitalism. I found the concept of “The last man” interesting. He describes how the last man sees himself at the end of things. Everything has happened to him. If he flicked through the channels, he would only see dead history. However I feel the last man is a figure in conformity, in a world where everything is the same because the last man has no ability to change.

The second speaker was David Orrell on the art of prediction. He spoke about how through the ages; people have tried to create prediction models. However these models had problems, which caused a percentage of inaccuracy:

•    Local effects in complex systems lead to emergent properties that cannot be reduced to simple physical laws. E.g. Clouds
•    Complex systems are dominated by opposing positive and negative non-linear feedback loops. E.g. Stock market – momentum buyers versus value investors.

He also spoke about how it is possible to create a prediction for some living system, but it is difficult due to the rate of change varying from different speeds. E.g. prevent the heart attack rather than say when it will be.
I feel what he said at the end of the lecture, (it could have been during Q&A) helped sum up part of this lecture:
“ We can’t predict the future, but we can shape it”

Keyword - Predictability