George Soros on Reflexivity?

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Hi,

I'd be interested to know if anybody has come across George Soros's theory of "reflexivity" and, if so, what you think of it.

If not, here's a link to something on it:
http://www.geocities.com/ecocorner/intelarea/gs1.html

Roughly, the idea of reflexivity is that traditional scientific method can not be applied to social (or human) circumstances, because the assumption of objectivity does not apply - our system is based on what we think and believe, which is influenced by what we think and believe.

Soros's application has been to financial markets, and more recently politics. He realized that traditional economics's assumption that perception equals reality produced flawed predictions about market performance. He made a fortune betting against market trends that he saw as being influenced by faulty perception or analysis.

I thought this might also be of interest to AS folks, who have direct experience of the NT world frequently being non-literal - based on convention and perception of what we think, rather than objective fact or analysis.

I read about Mr. Soros's theory a long time ago, and it seemed valid to me. Personally, I'm glad it was Soros that thought of applying it to the market, because he has done a lot of good with his wealth. Some others might apply it for less worthy ends.

My own take on this general subject is that all we know is gained through our perceptions; and since, most likely, no two people experience and interpret perceptions in the same way--not to mention that no two people share the same accumulated body of perceptions--the notion of objectivity is itself illusory.

I believe we can never know just what a "consensus" such as is required for use of the scientific method, really is. The scientific method may well be the finest tool ever devised, but it ultimately relies on perception, and perception is not objective.

Society pretty obviously is a precarious structure and humans don't fare well at such tasks as cooperation, mutual support, and general caring. That we're able to get on with things at all seems exceptionally strange, given our widely dissimilar individual natures and accumulated beliefs.

I strongly disagree, and I am not even speaking of his left-wing politics. Mr. Soros ironically engages in the most predatory form of capitalism that can be engaged in: currency speculation. In 1992 he wagered successfully that he could devalue the English pound. This action resulted in him becoming 1.1 billion dollars richer but damaged Britain's economy. This is just one of many examples. George Soros is not a man of the people in any sense of the word.

ADDENDUM: His "wagering" by the way, consisted, of him using his large amounts of money. He saw he had a lot of money, and he saw he could manipulate the system. Just as he attempted to do by manipulating the 2004 Presidential election by spending large amounts of cash on left-wing interest groups. This doesn't have anything to do with AS people versus NT people. This has to do with a rich socialist who wants to became richer and also thinks he is smarter then ever everyone else and wants to have his way.

ADDENDUM 2: I shouldn't have commented. I failed to address Mr. Soros's "theory of reflexity" and simply replied in annoyance to the comments to a member. Ugh... Sorry. I should do better then that.

Exactly... how would such a consensus be established? Science has recently tried to extrapolate it from biology, but even then it seems the results are skewed by what questions are asked, which are influenced by what issues are generally believed to be important at the time. Doesn't science often seem just to "prove" the conventional wisdom of its era?

What intrigued me about reflexivity is the idea that we as individuals are influenced much more by what other people think than we care to admit - and perhaps that we're bad at identifying the difference between ideas and facts (I think there's something in Buddhism about that too).

I also wonder why our individuality seems to be such an issue. Shouldn't it be a positive thing?

I guess what intrigued me about his process, whatever his motives, is that he was also betting against the conventional wisdom of the market. His argument in the book is along the lines of "what do you do when you see everybody else doing something you think is mistaken?" So, he bet against these other speculators.

The "dot com" boom in the US fascinated me for similar reasons. There was some legitimacy to it at the start, but after a while it was a self-reinforcing process where people who didn't really understand what was happening were buying more and more stock because the values were being driven up by other people who really didn't understand what was going on buying more and more stock.

Then it's a social phenomenon, not an economic one. My guess would be that AS people are less suspectible to these kinds of trends than NT folks - less likely to buy into something just because everybody else believes it?