Resophistication

While working on an interview and article with the mathematician and economist Michael Edesess for the Advanced Institute (AI) here in HK (Hong Kong), the issue of "elegance" versus "sophistication" has arisen. Specifically in terms of the appropriation and misuse of the term "sophistication" by the financial services industry.

As in a hedge fund manager plying a client with, "We have employed an extremely sophisticated mathematical model" -- [which by definition you, the client, could not possibly understand; so, please write me a check and step away from the desk]." Actually in the world of high finance this the cash reserves are most likely intuited from one account to the other without the necessity of ink. A Daoist return to an earlier stage of human existence where transactions are done telepathically.

Whereas, in mathematics, you might refer to an "elegant" formula -- which is so defined, as Eldesess writes, "because it encapsulates the mathematical result of a series of idealizations in a compact, closed-form formula (meaning that one does not need to run a lengthy sequential-approximations computer program in order to obtain a numerical answer. It is not sophisticated because it's only an abstraction, it doesn't really, by itself, give you a meaningful real-world answer)."

To then pull in another strand from an individual involved in terminological discussions on "sophistication," I move to Roger Ames and his recent book Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. At the beginning of the volume Ames sets out a shift in Western philosophical concerns where the Greek and Christian traditions grew into "the service of theology, and reverence for the theoretically and spiritually abstract . . . a growing preoccupation with ontological and metaphysical questions led to a more rarified and pointed search for an abstract, unconditioned knowledge, and its promise of certainty."

Ames moves further into discussion of "philosophia" (the love of wisdom) and "philoepisteme" (the love of knowledge), in looking at the current state of the academy, where "wisdom" has become a largely abandoned concept. In its place is abstract thought employed for the purposes of certainty. Though this is a certainty that remains abstract and divorced from the quotidian; separate from the real exploration of the self and wisdom.

These are the dual voices running through my head, and I've done neither Roger nor Michael justice in fully explicating their positions; but, I'm primarily interested in working through the terms, and in this particular instance, the confluence of a mathematician's mention of a formula being "elegant" but not "sophisticated" because it remains abstract and doesn't end in a "real-world" answer, and a comparative philosopher who is, at least in part, speaking about similar forms of abstraction for "certainty," though a certainty of "knowledge" rather than "wisdom."

Which eventually leads back to the hedge fund manager who freely uses the term "sophistication/ed" as a way of creating distance from any potential investor questions. It can't be stated as an issue of "knowledge," as a well-informed investor could, theoretically, study the methods behind the modelling (representation of the financial forecast), and eventually come to understand the system. It must necessarily be a matter of "sophistication" -- of a "wisdom" within an aether that remains just out of reach. Cue music for financial crisis.