What the book actually asks is much more interesting: how should machine learning change when the thing being predicted is an asset price?

What I find interesting in this book is that Nagel does not treat finance as just another machine learning problem. In many ML applications, the objective seems fairly straightforward: feed a model enough information, identify patterns, minimize prediction error, and test whether the model works on new data. Nice and tidy.

Bad news is investors do not simply sit there while an algorithm discovers a profitable pattern. They trade on it. Their trades move prices. Those price changes can then weaken the exact relationship the model just discovered.

We know almost immediately whether a room sounds good.

Just like the sound quality of a good speaker vs lousy headphone. Music can feel warm, thin, brilliant, muddy, intimate, or distant. Attaching numbers to those impressions is considerably harder. Smyth traces the period when architects, physicists, musicians, and engineers began trying to do precisely that.

Building is a musical instrument. Architecture does not simply contain sound; it participates in producing what we hear. Materials, surfaces, furnishings, dimensions, and even the bodies occupying a room alter its acoustic character. By the middle of the twentieth century, buildings could effectively be “tuned.” Yet Smyth resists presenting this as a neat story in which intuition was steadily replaced by science. The history is much messier.

What does a “frenemy” look like in the political realm?

Perhaps two countries that clash over borders, distrust each other’s strategic ambitions and quietly prepare for the possibility of conflict, yet still trade extensively, participate in the same multilateral forums and cooperate whenever their interests happen to converge.

China and India are almost a textbook example of this contradiction.

They both seek substantial reform of international institutions to better reflect their growing economic weight. Both resist Western criticism of their approaches to human rights and secessionist movements, both maintain close relations with Russia, and both are potentially vulnerable to Trump’s tariff wars.

Their relationship is neither friendship nor straightforward rivalry, but an uneasy coexistence in which competition and cooperation frequently occur in tandem.

Human cognition was shaped not in laboratories but in tribes, where social cohesion mattered more than accuracy. Under such conditions, natural selection rewarded socially adept coalition-builders rather than truth-seekers. Intelligence evolved not merely to understand reality, but to navigate status hierarchies within it. Modern cognitive science has merely mapped the machinery beneath this condition: confirmation bias, framing effects, anchoring bias, availability bias, fluency bias, perseverance bias, and identity-protective cognition all demonstrate the same uncomfortable truth. The mind is not a pristine instrument of logic intermittently corrupted by bias. Bias is built into the architecture itself.

Yet, one may ask, if human cognition is so profoundly biased, tribal, and irrational, how does reliable knowledge emerge at all?

Few ideas are as quietly disquieting as the one at the heart of Privatising Humanity. Kate Bayliss’s contention is not simply that essential services have been privatized. It is that the act of living itself has been reorganized into a series of revenue streams. To turn on a tap or a light, or to inhabit a home, is no longer merely to consume. It is to participate in a system designed to extract.

What is suicide?

Is Socrates, drinking hemlock at the state’s command, a suicide? Is the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect civilian counted as one? The spy who swallows cyanide rather than speak? The 108-year-old woman in chronic pain who ends her life? The Japanese samurai who sliced his own stomach to take responsibility? Are all of these acts to be gathered under a single definition—and, if so, are they all to be read as mental illness or clinically depressed?

Has prohibiting ways of speaking ever enlarged understanding? It rarely has.

In societies that pride themselves on pluralism and freedom of thought, it is striking how readily a single authorized language for suicide is accepted.

For a species capable of using mathematics to predict the oscillations of quantum fields, we remain perplexingly ignorant to our own cognition. We possess no canonical framework for curiosity, no prescriptive law for envy, no generally sanctioned account of how a child extrapolates grammar from the detritus of everyday speech.

In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph Alois Schumpeter delivers a deliberately unsentimental anatomy of modern capitalism, stripping it of equilibrium fantasies. For all the virtues he attributes to capitalism, Schumpeter is unambiguous in his expectation that it will eventually exhaust itself and give way to socialism. He rejects Marx’s historical materialism and the crude determinism of class struggle, yet arrives at a similarly unsettling destination: capitalism, he argues, is perfectly capable of engineering its own demise.

By now, the familiar indictments of capitalism have become a litany: the widening gulf between the affluent and the struggling, the rise of corporate monopolies, recurrent financial crises, the fading myth of the invisible hand, and the perceived failure of markets to deliver broad prosperity.

Millennials, the cohort poised to assume the reins of power, have largely internalised this narrative—convinced of capitalism’s ailments, which, in my view, have mostly stood beyond dispute, yet perhaps too certain of their provenance.

The human species is condemned to possess an advanced intellect, one that renders it painfully aware of its own inevitable death. As beings perpetually stalked by the specter of mortality, humans are ensnared in an unrelenting existential paradox. At its core, the catalyst of human behavior is the insatiable pursuit of dominion over the intrinsic and all-encompassing terror of death.

How though? Humans are forced to accept the inevitability of physical death, because there’s no denial available. Yet, we are very imaginative creatures, so in our relentless avoidance of mortality, in our aversion to finality, in seeking to deny the uncomfortable death at all cost, we place high hopes on other forms of eternity— whether that be building empires to leave a legacy, to devote ourselves to religion so we go to heaven, or to become the hero and fight the evils in order to create meanings for our lives.

Land decides what unifies and what divides. This is specifically true for India. Geography has influenced both the nation’s cohesion and its remarkable heterogeneity. The vast, predominantly flat countryside, fosters a sense of uniformity across regions, subtly reinforcing an intrinsic unity despite the manifold linguistic, cultural, and regional disparities. However, geography also acts as a potent demarcating force. The Himalayas, that towering natural bastion between India and the rest of Asia, not only shield the subcontinent but also preserve its spiritual and cultural integrity, epitomized by their reverence as the abode of the gods. Likewise, the Western Ghats, with their rugged escarpments, have significantly shaped India’s political history, particularly in facilitating the rise of the Maratha Empire, which utilized the mountains as a strategic stronghold against Mughal encroachment. These geographical barriers have decisively influenced the movement of trade, migration, and military campaigns, thereby shaping India’s political evolution.