A few years ago, as a new list member, I often referred to him by his full name, but a fellow list member let me in on the mailing list's etiquette: "You should address him as The Chair"
So, throughout this post, I will refer to Victor Neiderhoffer as "The Chair".
Who was The Chair?
Since his passing, The Chair has been honored by the racquet sports community (he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of both squash and paddleball)
He, however, branded himself a “speculator,” which, by his interpretation, is making decisions under incomplete information.
“Speculator” in The Chair's community is simply a word that can be loosely interpreted as “investor” or “trader”. In fact, the majority of the tributes I came across were from the finance community.
However, to me, I would regard him as “The Master of Consilience”
A Life of Consilience
Consilience is a term coined by E. O. Wilson to refer to “The Unity of Knowledge”. Applying concepts from one field of science to another in a useful way.
In finance, for example, it is widely known that “quants” pick ideas from physics like Brownian motion and apply them to financial markets. The Black-Scholes equation for options pricing, for instance, has been regarded as analogous to the heat equation in thermodynamics.
In most of the finance community, however, physics and math are usually where consilience taps out.
The Chair once mentioned that “Everything is connected”.
When talking about the knowledge he used to model markets. It was an assortment of checkers, oceanography, chemical reactions, fictional books about cowboys, Boolean algebra, ecology, trees, and much more.
On reading his book, “The Education of a Speculator”. He, for example, picked ideas from DNA and sheet music, then described market analogies for DNA and the sheet music, respectively.
It was mind-blowing to me how someone could apply so many concepts from seemingly unrelated fields to financial markets.
What is very important about The Chair and his insights was that all these ideas were tested so they could be used in markets.
It was not just armchair philosophy, which initially I thought it was.
True Scientific Thinking
Unfortunately for me, I used to think a true scientist was someone with good credentials (this is the “appeal to authority” cognitive bias), and this was how I would primarily source information.
But then, The Chair once spoke the following words;
One thing you should know about me, is that I have never recommended something that I haven't tested.
We should not be asking if this works or not, what we should be asking is, Have you tested that?
In the crypto anarchist community, it is often mentioned, “do not trust, but verify.”
I think the scientific community urgently needs something similar to what The Chair conjured.
An idea sounding crazy is not “pseudoscience” if it actually works, or if the tests validate the idea.
My dreams of once meeting him personally have been shattered.
Rest In Peace Chair, and thank you very much for sharing your knowledge!
No comments yet