"The deepest and most worthy rabbit hole you can possibly dive into is the question of identity."
This might amuse you. Back in the late Middle Ages (Byzantine period) I was a high-priced computer systems consultant -- that is, I wrote programs to patch up broken systems when all else failed. I was not political enough to get into the good mathy stuff -- they had people with advanced degrees for that. However, I used to go by and chat with those guys from time to time to find out what was going on in the grown-up world. One day, one of them said to me, "We're constructing a universal identity system for this business (a very large, very famous brokerage house)."
"Whoa," I said. "You're embarking on analyzing a very difficult philosophical problem." In other words, going down a deep rabbit hole, although that phrase hadn't become fashionable yet.
You might think that what they mean by identity in the financial world is a bit simpler than the congeries of concepts around the idea of the self, self-hood, individuality, category membership, representation, impersonation, and so on, but it is still pretty complicated, because, for instance, an "account" could mean a person, part of a person (as when one has many "accounts"), a partnership, a corporation, a part of a corporation, an interest group, relatives, heirs and assigns, trusts, persons with power of attorney, and so on -- the list is probably infinite, but of course what the institution wants is to give everybody a number. Can't do it. But the geniuses laughed me off.
Months and months later they were still working on the problem -- way down in the rabbit hole by then -- and the bosses were preparing their blowtorches. "Ha, ha," I would say to the geniuses on my visits. "You should have stayed awake in your Phil 101 class." (Hard to do, I will admit.)
Fortunately for everybody the company went out of business not long after that.
"The deepest and most worthy rabbit hole you can possibly dive into is the question of identity."
This might amuse you. Back in the late Middle Ages (Byzantine period) I was a high-priced computer systems consultant -- that is, I wrote programs to patch up broken systems when all else failed. I was not political enough to get into the good mathy stuff -- they had people with advanced degrees for that. However, I used to go by and chat with those guys from time to time to find out what was going on in the grown-up world. One day, one of them said to me, "We're constructing a universal identity system for this business (a very large, very famous brokerage house)."
"Whoa," I said. "You're embarking on analyzing a very difficult philosophical problem." In other words, going down a deep rabbit hole, although that phrase hadn't become fashionable yet.
You might think that what they mean by identity in the financial world is a bit simpler than the congeries of concepts around the idea of the self, self-hood, individuality, category membership, representation, impersonation, and so on, but it is still pretty complicated, because, for instance, an "account" could mean a person, part of a person (as when one has many "accounts"), a partnership, a corporation, a part of a corporation, an interest group, relatives, heirs and assigns, trusts, persons with power of attorney, and so on -- the list is probably infinite, but of course what the institution wants is to give everybody a number. Can't do it. But the geniuses laughed me off.
Months and months later they were still working on the problem -- way down in the rabbit hole by then -- and the bosses were preparing their blowtorches. "Ha, ha," I would say to the geniuses on my visits. "You should have stayed awake in your Phil 101 class." (Hard to do, I will admit.)
Fortunately for everybody the company went out of business not long after that.