Taste and shape
Travelling through order books
As a reader of day-to-day ‘content’, I’m beginning to suffer from AI-fatigue. It’s not that AI content is necessarily worse, it’s just that sometimes I don’t know who I’m talking to. I want to ask, “is that your opinion or are you channeling claude-sonnet et. al.?”
Yes, I think it does matter. If you can’t tell the difference, we’re in trouble.
To salvage such situations, think of them as interactions with our collective unconscious mediated imperfectly through human agents. This makes the experience more interesting or, at least, less sad.
Also, spotting AI-content is an interesting exercise. It’s a bit like a ‘blind tasting’. You don’t know how the content was produced, but you can (or must) experience the results. What conclusions do you draw?
There’s an exploration by Freeman Dyson about whether the brain is digital or analogue. There’s a clear difference, I think, between expressions of our analogue intelligence and expressions of the digital collective unconscious, just like there’s a remarkable difference between good wine and boring wine.
Of course AI is a useful tool. I’ve been using it to explore balancing market data. The classical theory around financial market microstructure is well-developed and rather beautiful. The idea is to emulate the approach in the reserve energy market context, starting in Germany. A time-consuming exercise, but token intelligence speeds it up.
German reserve energy is physical, one-sided, product-specific, rule-bound flexibility so the market microstructure literature does not apply directly. Yet there is enough correspondence to make for an interesting translation exercise.
German balancing energy is often discussed through prices, reforms, activation volumes, and scarcity events. The more revealing object is one layer lower: the pre-activation shape of the submitted reserve-energy book. AI-generated opinion.
All of this is about intuition and familiarity. We need a sense for the shape of the market before thinking about how it might develop. Do you have a sense of shape for the energy markets you care about like the the Regelleistungsarbeitsmarkt (Balancing Energy Market)? Let’s develop our taste for shapes.
