The Enemy Within

In epistemology, an area of philosophy, the subject of appearance and reality is something that’s often debated. Is that which I see really how the world is? Of course it isn’t. I only have a limited view of the world based on my limited capabilities as a human. I can’t see microscopic things, I can’t see into space. I can’t hear what an elephant hears, I can’t smell what a dog smells. So how can I make a judgement about the thoughts and decisions of an unspecified amount of participants in a large game each using different methods, many using the same, but hidden deliberately from view, in order to maximise the potential reward from the game.

The answer is definitely not to rely on a faulty method of data capture and on an unreliable way of analysing that data. I don’t have access to the totality of information. I don’t have the mental capacity to speedily analyse all that information. But I do have access to all the information of a particular mode of behaviour and how it’s behaved over time, in this case, the historical data of financial instruments. But again the problem remains of having an unreliable way of analysing that data, i.e. my brain.

Given a small amount of information, most people can come to the same conclusion repeatedly about it no matter how many times it’s presented to them. If that was all the information there was when making decisions then it wouldn’t be that hard, and in everyday life we get by just fine. We don’t need to make complicated decisions all the time and neither would we want to.

But what if we’re participating in a game with an unspecified amount of participants each with thoughts hidden from us. We can guess, based on our limited information on how they might behave. We can never know with certainty and given that we have an unreliable method of analysing large amounts of known information, let alone a variety of thoughts that could be forming at any given moment, then the question is: If one has to participate in the game, how do you predict with a reasonable degree of probability what is going to happen at any given moment in time?

You can’t. You might think you can. And then the next moment you might think you can’t. And that’s the problem.

The solution is to find a method of analysing a large amount of information that will repeatedly give the same results each and every time you analyse it. Upon discovering this reliable method, apply it to different sets of information.