Fischer Black Quotes

The character of Jesus is the character of God. God would never do something Jesus would find morally reprehensible, so if you can’t find it in Jesus, then you really ought to think twice before you claim you’ve found it in God.

I believe we best say yes to God's glory and sovereignty by saying no to Calvinism.

Faith, doubt, humility, and confidence—this is the stuff and substance of theology at its best. Swagger, smugness, and certainty—this is the stuff and substance of ideology at its worst.

There is a great distance between skepticism and confidence and an equally great distance between confidence and certainty. God helps us bridge the gap between skepticism and confidence, but he doesn’t seem particularly concerned with building us a bridge from confidence to certainty. Due

Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.

The God of Romans 9–11 finds ways to show mercy, even when the facts clamor for judgment. This doesn’t sound much like Calvinism to me, but it does sound a whole lot like Jesus.

Daily Jesus challenges you to follow him up on the cross so your old self can continue to be crucified, and daily you must decide if you will do so. Daily Jesus invites you to join him on mission, reaching out to the lost and the least, and daily you must decide if you will do so.

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony. This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.

Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing—the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact—our worse fears are true—all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity that makes them look black to us. And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying him. Not even fear. It is true we have his threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from his point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If his ideas of good are so very different from ours, what he calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. Finally, if reality at its root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.41

ORIGIN OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS When Namibia won its independence in 1990, the main avenue of the capital city still bore the name Göring. Not for Hermann, the Nazi, but in honor of his father, Heinrich Göring, one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the twentieth century. That Göring, who represented the German Empire in the southwest corner of Africa, kindly approved in 1904 an annihilation order given by General Lothar von Trotta. The Hereros, black shepherds, had risen up in rebellion. The colonial authorities expelled them all and warned that any Herero found in Namibia, man, woman, or child, armed or unarmed, would be killed. Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun. The survivors of the butchery ended up in concentration camps set up by Göring. And Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow pronounced for the very first time the word “Konzentrationslager.” The camps, inspired by a British forerunner in South Africa, combined confinement, forced labor, and scientific experimentation. The prisoners, emaciated from a life in the gold and diamond mines, served as human guinea pigs for research into inferior races. In those laboratories worked Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, who later became the teachers of Josef Mengele. Mengele carried forth their work as of 1933, the year that Göring the son set up the first concentration camps in Germany, following the model his father pioneered in Africa.

As Greg Boyd states: Why should we assume that God desires to do everything he has the raw power to do? . . . Scripture makes it evident that though God could control us, he desires to empower us to be self-determining, morally responsible agents. “Whatever the Lord pleases he does,” including creating free agents. 106

Sloane Sullivan, thirty years old. Pyro mage. Top ten percent of his training class. Anger issues, loyal, broken family, only child. Master of wards. Fischer Bahri, thirty years old. Cognitive mage. Interrogator, ability to not only read emotions but also push them, alter memories, hypnotize. Valedictorian of his training class. Loving family, one sister and two nieces. Cameron Jacobs, thirty-one years old. Storm mage. Protector, fierce fighter, relentless. Can manipulate weather within a seventy-five mile radius with the ability to create more localized storms. Generates lightning from hands. Severe childhood trauma. Fear of loss. Kaito Mori, twenty-nine years old. Shifter mage. Black panther: Bagheera. Heightened sense of smell, vision, and hearing. Oldest of five children. Struggled with depression in the past.

I have had no formal training in economics of finance. I do not fully understand some of the tools and concepts used by those who have had that training. Sometimes I think I'm close, but then they slip away. I question many conventions in economic research; but in some cases, it's just that I don't fully understand them. I can't help but look at the big picture. The world is becoming more specialized, as my own theories suggest. I too try to specialize, but my mind keeps wandering. As a result, I make errors, both small and large. I don't like errors, and I'd appreciate help in finding them.

I try to say things clearly. this means confronting the work of others directly, rather than citing it and moving on. It means a nonacademic writing style. It sometimes means stating as fact things that are clearly opinion. No doubt the reader's glasses differ from mine. But we are all looking at the same world, and the technology for making glasses is constantly improving. Someday it will all be clear.

Estimation' suggests a Bayesian approach to data, while 'testing' suggests a classical approach. I prefer estimation, since I think researchers who want to test often choose models that are more specific than the economics require. They talk of adding restrictions for no reason other than making their models easier to reject.

Those who do use models consistent with general equilibrium add assumptions that make their models much more specific. They may still aim for models general enough to explain many things, but they speak of 'identifying restrictions,' or restrictions that make it possible to 'reject' the models by looking at conventional economic data. I like creating more specific models, too, but only when I have strong economic reasons for the restrictions I add.

I think it's better to 'estimate' a model than to test it. I take 'calibration' to be a form of estimation, so I'm sympathetic with it, so long as we don't take seriously the structure of a model we calibrate. Best of all, though, is to 'explore' a model. This means creating many specific examples of a general model, where each one explains a single stylized fact or perhaps a few features of the world. It means using some of these examples to elucidate microeconomic evidence.

In principle, we can estimate and even test the general equilibrium model. ... In practice, we probably won't try to estimate or test the most general version of the model. The costs of gathering detailed data on tastes and technology, and of experimenting with the economy, are too high. If we decide not to test the general equilibrium model, I think we should keep it around to help organize our thinking about stylized facts and other data.

Many of the models in the literature are not general equilibrium models in my sense. Of those that are, most are intermediate in scope: broader than examples, but much narrower than the full general equilibrium model. They are narrower, not for carefully spelled out economic reasons, but for reasons of convenience. I don't know what to do with models like that, especially when the designer says he imposed restrictions to simplify the model or to make it more likely that conventional data will lead us to reject it. The full general equilibrium model is about as simple as a model can be: we need only a few equations to describe it, and each is easy to understand. The restrictions usually strike me as extreme. When we reject a restricted version of the general equilibrium model, we are not rejecting the general equilibrium model itself. So why bother "testing" the restricted version? If we reject it, we will just create another version.

so I have also tried to be honest. And the best way I have found to be honest is to tell you my story: a journey in and out of Calvinism. As Chesterton once confessed, sometimes you have to be egotistical if you want to be sincere.3 In this reminiscing, something became

no misery to be saved from . . . So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s

heart of belief there is a leap. For various biblical, rational, and experiential

is easy, particularly if home has been a place of abuse or neglect. But oftentimes leaving home is difficult, especially if home has been a good place. Of course that is what home is meant to be: a good place, a place

It is often said that one’s theology is not tenable unless it can be preached at the gates of Auschwitz.

The memo provoked, and still provokes, deep division. At the time, the Foreign Office’s most strident critic was Thomas Sanderson, who rejected Crowe’s simplistic portrayal of German history as ‘an unchecked record of black deeds’.24 Since then, however, historians have tended to come down on Crowe’s side. Fritz Fischer’s Germany’s Aims in the First World War is the most controversial meditation on the idea that Germany sought to conquer Europe and the world. Yet his book is confined to Germany’s aims during the war, i.e. after the war began, when all nations were fighting for their lives; it finds no persuasive evidence that Germany intended global conquest – through force of arms – before the war began.

[God is] the One who in absolute freedom loves absolutely.

Far from being a treatise meant to justify God’s righteousness in unconditional election, Romans 9–11 is a treatise about the incomprehensible mercy and scandalous faithfulness of God towards his creatures, through the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.

CAPM pioneer Bill Sharpe remarked, “I have concluded that I may never see an empirical result that will convince me that it disconfirms any theory,” which reiterated Fischer Black’s (1993) feeling, “I find theory to be far more powerful than data.

People don’t choose Calvinism or free-will theism because one side has clearly proven itself right, but because they “find one set of mysteries easier to live with than the other.

This means Christian theology moves from Jesus to God, and not from what you think you know about God to Jesus. You find God on Jesus’s terms or you find something that isn’t God.

Back in 1967, I had taken a further step in figuring out how much a warrant was worth. Using plausible and intuitive reasoning, I supposed that both the unknown growth rate and the discount factor in the existing warrant valuation formula could be replaced by the so-called riskless interest rate, namely that which was paid by a US Treasury bill maturing at the warrant expiration date. This converted an unusable formula with unknown quantities into a simple practical trading tool. I began using it for my own account and for my investors in 1967. It performed spectacularly. In 1969, unknown to me, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, motivated in part by Beat the Market, rigorously proved the identical formula, publishing it in 1972 and 1973.

God is always sovereign, but that means he—and not we—gets to decide what shape that sovereignty takes. And apparently, God’s sovereignty makes room for human freedom so that God and humans can have a personal, and not merely causal, relationship

Chess contains no hidden information and very little luck. The pieces are all there for both players to see. Pieces can’t randomly appear or disappear from the board or get moved from one position to another by chance. No one rolls dice after which, if the roll goes against you, your bishop is taken off the board. If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see. You can theoretically go back and figure out exactly where you made mistakes. If one chess player is more than just a bit better than another, it is nearly inevitable the better player will win (if they are white) or, at least, draw (if they are black). On the rare occasions when a lower-ranked grand master beats a Garry Kasparov, Bobby Fischer, or Magnus Carlsen, it is because the higher-ranked player made identifiable, objective mistakes, allowing the other player to capitalize.

Joe Biden constantly used the term “Super Predator” when referring to young Black Men, according to my sources." (November 2020)

Furthermore, if God has determined everything, hasn’t God also determined the sins that he is going to send people to hell forever for? Hasn’t God made sure that people will commit the sins he will then judge them for? If so, how is that just? And then there’s the question that pulls together these issues of love and justice: how is God good? If—before the creation of a single human being—God chose to send people to hell for sins he ordained they would commit, how is he good?

And this brings us back to Karl Barth. Towards the end of his life, he made his one and only trip to America, lecturing at Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago. Legend has it that at some point Barth was asked to summarize the meaning of the millions of words he had written. He thought for a moment and then said: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

I’m not sure anything tells us more about who God is than the great Christological hymn of Philippians 2: Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men . . . He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

An illustration borrowed from Roger Olson might be helpful here. A man has fallen into a pit, is unconscious, and will eventually die. But God calls out to the man and offers help, awakening him from his unconsciousness. God starts pouring water down into the pit and tells the man that if he will just stay still, he can float on the water up to rescue. All the man has to do is not struggle or try to hold on to the bottom. All he has to do to be saved is surrender.117 His “contribution” to his salvation is the contribution of doing nothing.