I've found what I think some will find to be a real treat :-) Reminds me of the Truman Capote of science.

Ingo Swann - Human Super Sensitivities and the Future - YouTube

All the best

I figured you'd know about him - his work is in line with "self-directed neuroplasticity". Have you seen John Lilly's "programming and meta-programming in the human biocomputer"? Obviously dated in terms of neuroscience but science relating to the mind often only catches up with what might be called "folk knowledge".

LSD is an awesome way to learn about your mind and what is possible in terms of different "realities" (i.e., how your mind builds up its unique representation of the physical/emotional/rational world). I spent several years in my youth exploring consciousness with it (it is impossible not to sound like a hippie when speaking of LSD - we really don't have a good lexicon or cultural framework for the type of knowledge/experience available in this realm). When used properly LSD (or psilocybin) can at least allow you to temporarily see other possibilities for looking at how you build up the reality you inhabit (here I mean reality in terms of how your mind constructs its representation - not in terms of physical laws, causality, etc).

Although I agree with what Chogyam Trungpa says about LSD being like "driving a car to go next door" and with what Richard Alpert says about it being a great way to be shown the way but that durable expansion of consciousness/potential only comes through diligent effort over time (an idea that aligns well with Jeffrey Schwartz's concept of "mental force" and how directed attention promotes neuroplasticity).

All good stuff!

Very interesting, thanks! Especially like Gigerenzer (intuition vs. algo discussion, simple vs. complex, full vs. partial info...etc.).

Found a paper by him on Smarter Heuristics. Looking forward to reading his books on Gut Feelings and Risk.

Thanks @Deucalion - great post w great links, etc. I like the talk by Farmer and looked more into INET - they just hosted a symposium in Berlin this last weekend. Soros was a co-sponsor and has a few talks including one on reflexivity that I haven't had a chance to watch yet. I did watch Damasio's address and found him interesting as always. Also looked more into Gigerenzer and his book on guy feelings. All this helps... my skull is thick but its starting to open up...

Thanks. I love Edge.org. A lot of people find it to be intellectual masturbation, but I've picked up some interesting concepts there.

As a strange coincidence, but very off-topic, (thankfully this whole thread is), someone presented me with a paper yesterday:

https://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/21515778.03.01.01.pdf

which is based on C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures

The editor of Edge.org, John Brockman, wrote Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution

A brief description here:
The Third Culture | Edge

To sum up my thoughts of the paper:

A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician. - Karl Weierstrass

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.
—Albert Einstein

Surely you are joking about Bayesian analysis not applying to trading.

These 2 old old articles (How experts make decisions under uncertainty - PART I & Part II.) for some reason triggered some very deep clicks in my head last year when I came across them (both on Bayesian inferences, both by Dr Brett on decision making processes with uncertain and incomplete datasets). At that point I had not heard about any of this - Bayesians, heuristics, adaptive & evolutionary behaviours. What a difference one year makes!

Both talk about how our brains have the ability to process old and new information, and how this information is weighted and meshed. Rational traders have the ability, with either mechanical methods or experience, to place proper weight age to new and unfolding information. Emotional traders don't. Both him and Salzman & Trifan below suggest the same thing, as does Gigerenzer. The latter goes a step in a different direction suggesting that simple heuristics can optimize those analytical methods more than people give them credit.

In this study (uploaded pdf), in 2005, Trifan and Salzman attempted to study market behaviour of Rationals (Bayesians) and Emotionals. I have highlighted some sections I found interesting regarding the behaviours of traders in the decison making process. Essentially, they conclude that, as expected, the Rationals performed best.

They also noted that under certain conditions the emotional traders (relying on honed intuition) may overcome the shortcoming of their emotional leanings by fine tuning their intuition in a similar manner to the rationals. They even suggest that, it may be possible for the emotional trader to produce out size returns as compared to the Rationals in such a case.

This suggests that emotive trading when guided with certain Bayesian behaviours with honed intuition (which is being considered a learned skill these days) is a powerful combination. I have viewed hard work , screen time, open conceptualization and a study of history as some of the ways intutition can be tuned (and I continue to do so).

Gigerenzer (who is referenced in the above study) suggests that both simple heuristics and intution play an often misjudged role in decision making (especially when considering decision making in an uncertain world). This gels, as none of thse concepts stand alone or in violation of another, but seemingly as a cohesive, meshed thought process. I found these very constructive (about intuition and the role of simple heuristics in optimising the decision making process). I don't under stand much about heuristics itself yet, but in time hopefully it will get better.

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Both the paper and Gerd suggest that these methods by themselves are not superior, but that they should be not be shunned simply becuase they cannot be quantified as easily as other traditional methods of analysis.

There is paper referenced to Andrew Lo about markets, evolution and adaptive behaviour that was also referenced somewhere else (I cannot remember where) and even more cool was the reference to Doyne Farmer's paper on Market Force (that was one of the foundations of his research leading to the Prediction Company discussed earlier.)

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My point is this - when I read Brett's papers initally about how figher pilots make decisions in seconds with new unfolding information for survival, or how athletes change their response mid swing or mid action, this clicked with me. On a very simple level, I related that instantly to how I play squash, often changing my decisions mid swing or mid - stroke. How I will evaluate strokes long before I hit them, as my opposer is simply moving and before he hits his shot. In 15years, my decision making in squash has become intuitive. Fluid. I don't have to think any more, it just comes. In my mind, I have been able to isolate instances that my trading has displayed similar characteristics. I have no doubt this is from practice, screen time and focus. In trading, I am no where close to that fluid level, there is too much thinking going on, and not enough honed intuition so far.

I have no doubt that this path will contiue to fine tune itself as long as I don't do anything stupid. I believe most traders would benefit from that, even if they are mechanical types. Problem is, this is no doubt hard to put down on paper, hard to show to others, hard to demonstrate with pretty and squiggly lines. people don't pay sustained attention to it for long enough to see results. And therefore, the lack of interest in this forum to such dry things.

The response to the mind games stuff on other threads is very encouraging though, people are waking up...and that is step one, I think.

As cool as the above stuff is to me, this one well and truly blows my mind, not just plain old brain elasticity, but actual neurogensis. Wowsa!

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Dr Kandel with the more of the same.... Healthy Minds ~ Neurogenesis (#108) | WLIW21 Productions

And the best for last, a true pioneering miscreant.... The Molecules of Emotion (Dr Candice Pert)

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Funnily, that vid about Pert, reminded me of this...."Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money". Now, which wise guy said that?

Thanks for the links, @Deucalion. Interesting stuff indeed!

I was joking about Bayesian inference, of course. I think you have me confused with someone who wish to guide others to the end of the trading rainbow...

I am a very intuitive thinker, but I have a long way to go in order to understand how that process actually works.

I think in pictures and often find it hard to describe my feelings and thoughts. I classify things based on a intuitive feeling of coarseness and shades of color. I have great difficulty remembering auditory information, and I struggle with separating background noise from speech. It's nearly impossible for me to watch a "noisy" movie without subtitles for me; I experience sensory overload. I also have difficulty focusing on a single stream of information, especially such banalities as small talk, and normally drift in and out of the dialog. However, when I really get interested in something, I experience a sort of "hyperconcentration" where I am oblivious of my surroundings.

However, I'm also mathematically inclined and like to quantify my intuition as much as possible. It's very important to distinguish between emotion and intuition, though. I'm a quite calm, rational human being, but my intuition simply outperforms my other cognitive efforts. Since intuition can't easily be reverse engineered, it sometimes feels as if my brain is a black box. It's kind of like Plato's Cave; I can sense an outline of what is going on, but not completely.

My view has always been that there are complex processes in the unconscious that form my intuition. The more input I feed it, the better it performs. I've never understood why people have such a hard time accepting that theory. Probably it's because most people's intuition is not very fine-tuned. I spent quite a bit of time to be able to recognize and try to eliminate emotional bias. I've never been very emotionally affected, and I've always seen that as a human weakness. When people speak of using feelings to one's advantage, they are usually referring to intuition.

Quickly rereading what I wrote, I can see that I sound like an pretentious, egomaniacal, pompous ass. It seems that I think I am Nietzsche's Übermensch. That's not my intention, and that is also why I rarely speak of such matters. However, I thought it might be fitting for this thread.
To balance out the bragging, I would like to add that I am often quite a slow learner. I usually spend a lot of time getting the fundamentals right, but then I am usually able to take quantum leaps. I spend a lot of time focusing on the on the essence of the more complex aspects, before I even attempt to fully understand the basics. I really don't like the linear approach one is forced to follow in school.....

............In trading it seems that almost all are focused on very narrow fields, without having a deep understanding bout the interconnected "whole". I think this is a big mistake. It's in the complex relationships between the whole and the parts that the brain has the greatest advantage over machines. I am using a complex evolving system, my brain, to solve and exploit a complex adaptive system.

I'm much more interested in Bayesian probabilities with regard to machine learning. My interested in AI lies in the possibility of trying to quantify an approximation of my intuition. I've wanted to spend more time on this for years, but I haven't been able to actually get started until recently.

The problem with all of this, at least for me, is that it's more interesting than trading. So even though a lot of it might not necessarily be applicable to trading, I still want to delve into it. I'm screwed.... I've been working on a way to just focus on my swing trading for some time, and I think this is it...

Yeah, neurogenesis is a beautiful thing. Running seems to be a good type of exercise for this. Any exercise that involves balance and speed should be good. I can't wait for this to get more documented. At the rate I'm going, I'm afraid my brain will explode from all the new neurons...

P.S. Wasn't it Seykota who said that?

I forgot to add that good money and risk management is key if basing trades on one's intuition. I don't really want to get into details about it, but modeling for volatility is really helpful.

Aren't patterns wonderful?