I assume, I wouldn’t have got to know Armen Avanessian without 60pages. And even if I had in another context, I guess he wouldn’t have given me a book in little Pakistan Lichtenberg called Realismus Jetzt. Realismus Jetzt is a collection of essays, edited by Armen, mainly from philosophers –correct me Armen, if I am wrong– which are somehow related to the movement of speculative realism (which I frankly don’t know nothing about). To make it short, 60pages is good for your intellectual stimulation, believe me. But that’s not a post about stimulation, it’s about correlation. Why? One of the writers is Quentin Meillassoux, he writes about “Metaphysik, Spekulation, Korrelation”. I leave the metaphysical and the speculative parts out, as I am much more interested in the correlation part. “Unter dem Korrelationismus”, writes Meillassoux on p. 41, “verstehen wir in einer ersten Annäherung jede Philosophie, der zufolge es unmöglich ist, durch das Denken Zugang zu einem Sein zu erlangen, das unabhängig vom Denken ist.“ (If you know German read it twice, it helps). In my field of work (economics at large) correlation is just a number between 0 and 1 (and Correlationism with a capital “C” does not exist). Still, it’s basically one of the most important things you are looking for in your data. How are the share prices correlated with the overall economic development? These days, not much anymore since there is so much money out there (asset bubble).
*Some years ago Ludacris did a song called Stand Up. The chorus goes “when I move you move, just like that”. That’s what you want to know. Are you Ludacris or a you just correlated to him?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZG7IK99OvI