Black and White

Posted at 9:52 AM, June 10, 2007 · No Comments

[Also on Desicritics - with a few interesting comments there]

I’m a big fan of Emmanuel Derman. Both he and I are in the same field (quantitative finance) and he’s a much accomplished and widely published academic and quant, who’s at the top of his field. He gives good reason to us young ‘uns to look up to him.

Regardless of that though, I was reading his blog this morning and came across an interesting post entitled ’10cc of H2O’. He says:

I have a hard time dealing with these kinds of contradictions, when someone tells you something that is both half-true and half-nonsense. …. I like things and people to be clear cut; people should be either obviously smart or clearly bullshit artists. [link]

This got me thinking. I have rarely come across anything in my life that has been so clear-cut. The only exception to that is (possibly) my work, which is purely theoretical mathematics, but that exists only in one’s imagination, so I’m not sure if it really counts.

While it would be nice to have the world neatly divided into black and white, it has never been that simple for me. Take, for example, the US. When I first got here, I was a teenager, and pretty much everything about this country looked nice, shiny and bright. But beneath that gleaming surface (a consequence of the image it exports) were things that were neither gleaming nor bright. People were ignorant. Sometimes, more ignorant than those I had encountered back home. Life was fairly individualistic, which is nice for a while, but has its negative consequences (isolation, a spiritual void). And, from time to time, I was discriminated against. Nothing serious, but enough to remind me -when I was aware of it- that I didn’t quite belong here.

My point is that the country, while once The Best Place In The World for me, suddenly was no longer so great. Don’t get me wrong, the US has a lot to offer, but nothing in life is so black and white. Everything has its pros and cons.

Derman also talks about the movie, The Lives of Others, where a Stasi (the then-East German equivalent of the KGB) agent starts off being clear-cut about his role in the agency, and his purpose in life. He’s an up-and-coming agent at the top of his game and has few questions about what he’s doing. Life, for him, is black and white. Either you are a dissident or you’re not. There’s no gray area. That is, until he’s assigned to spy on a so-called dissident writer whom, the Stasi agent quickly realizes, is not quite a dissident. And that the entire assignment originated in the selfish motives of a senior officer, and not the so-called ‘good of the country’. His realization that life is not so black and white is what the movie is all about, and he pays for this realization dearly.

If there’s one thing that’s clear-cut, it’s that life, people and things are never black and white. In the Economics courses that I’ve both, taken and taught, the mantra “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” gets repeated endlessly. So perhaps life is something like that – you can’t have the good without the bad. You can’t have the pros without the cons. And anything that’s too good is, at the cost of writing a cliche, too good to be true.