[HN Gopher] An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-excha...
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An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-exchange markets
(2014)
Author : doener
Score : 222 points
Date : 2024-12-18 10:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| Reminds me of Mr. Goxx
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59432659
| anoncow wrote:
| rattraders.com is now a Yoga website with Lorem Ipsum text.
| yojo wrote:
| Found it in the Wayback machine, had to go back a few years:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...
| log_n wrote:
| Yeah the problem is that the average rat lives for less than
| four years, which doesn't let them see multiple market cycles.
| We must selectively breed or biologically engineer longer lived
| rats or else we will be curve fitting for a single market
| regime.
| giardini wrote:
| Yeah, all we need is a bunch of _smarter rats_!8-(
| iterance wrote:
| It's a famous Henry Ford quote actually. "If I had asked
| people what they wanted, they would have said smarter
| rats."
| cs702 wrote:
| _Brilliant._
|
| The artist's website[a] described the program perfectly using the
| soul-crushing jargon of corporate bureaucracy:
|
| > Our program is a professional service to the financial
| industry; rats are being trained to become superior traders in
| the financial markets. Using our own methodology in accordance
| with well-established animal training techniques, our subjects
| learn to recognize pattens in historical stock and futures data
| as well as generating trading signals. We provide solutions for
| tick based trading data and day based data. RATTRADERS rats can
| be trained exclusively for any financial market segment. They
| outperform most human traders and represent a much more economic
| solution for your trading desk.
|
| Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar
| Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much
| kindness and dignity as those rats.
|
| ---
|
| [a]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...
| notahacker wrote:
| Feels positively factual and hype-free compared with your
| average AI recommendation startup...
| conductr wrote:
| It's a rat race out there...
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to
| similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as
| much kindness and dignity as those rats.
|
| Is this art a statement about how poorly society treats the
| financial services industry?
| sodcyzf wrote:
| Its a statement on how to deal with the limited intelligence
| of a rat and give it a sense of dignity and purpose.
| fmbb wrote:
| "Society" does not treat financial "services" in any
| particular way.
|
| The owner class just treats their hackers of the financial
| system just as bad as they treat any other workers.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The owner class treats their hackers of the financial
| system far better than they treat the truckers and
| warehouse stockers of the logistics system.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| And it's hilarious that those people seldom talk about
| "class". The working class is almost entirely outside
| that kind of politics.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| The hackers are really the poor and oppressed underclass of
| our age is something I didn't think I'd ever hear.
|
| Delusions of revolution are really an upper-middle
| class/failed elite phenomenon.
| passivegains wrote:
| I'll never forget how James Mickens describes hackers in
| This World Of Ours: "vaguely Marxist but comfortably
| bourgeoisie."
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| BF Skinner legit trained pigeons to work in manufacturing
| assembly lines at hight of his popularity. I think it was maybe
| part QA at auto plants.
|
| I seem to recall program was cancelled only because it was very
| demotivating for the humans also working on the line.
| graemep wrote:
| IIRC it (or was it another assembly line using pigeons) was
| stopped because it was considered cruel to get them to
| perform such work.
|
| OK for humans though, apparently!
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Humans can consent.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Consent or starve
| cooljacob204 wrote:
| We can choose what jobs we work and find new ones unlike
| these pigeons.
| scp3125 wrote:
| I think you're missing the point about needing to work in
| order to survive.
| Pyxl101 wrote:
| Yes, but a person can still choose which job to work in
| order to optimize their happiness, trading off
| compensation with the work's enjoyment. A person can also
| invest in themselves and develop new skills to unlock
| additional types of jobs, etc.
| quantified wrote:
| This is geographically variable: the more rural you are,
| the less choice you have. And between comparable
| geography, there's a lot of variation. It's not just job,
| it's profession. To get an OK nursing or teaching job,
| you may need to move across counties or even states. You
| can invest in yourself if you have capital.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| You can invest in yourself if you have a library card.
| You can invest in yourself if you have internet.
|
| Yes, some people might have to move to get a job, but
| living somewhere isn't a right, at least in my mind.
| There's emotional and sentimental reasons to live where
| one currently does and it would be "painful" to live
| somewhere else, but is doable.
| hiatus wrote:
| Don't pigeons have to work to eat also? Unless food is
| just dropped into their nest each day there is no
| escaping the rat race, no creature is excluded.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| +1
|
| I find many in the tech space and especially in the
| business space struggle (with disturbing difficulty) with
| the idea of meaningful truely freely given consent. GDPR
| uses a mostly adequate definition[0]; with examples
| added:
|
| 1. Freely-given without penalty: Services cannot force
| you to accept by refusing or degrading service. Consent
| must be truly voluntary, a streaming platform that won't
| let you sign up or only allows you to watch up to 1080p
| unless you share your data with ad partners, is illegal.
|
| 2. Allowed to change your mind after you've previously
| consented: Withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving
| it. If one click gave consent, a single click must remove
| it. Bullying by requiring you to mail a letter, call a
| phone number, or navigate endless menus is illegal under
| GDPR.
|
| 3. The company must show clear evidence that you were
| informed and knowingly agreed: For example, they can't
| rely on a tiny pre-checked box hidden under layers of ToS
| or on vague "by using this service, you agree" language.
| Doing so is illegal. Even pre-ticking the agree box is
| illegal, the user must make an active choice.
|
| 4. Consent requests must use plain language and stand
| apart from the rest of the text: A single, prominent and
| clearly labeled statement "Do you agree to share your
| data with these marketing partners?" suffices. Burying it
| in 5 pages of legalese does not and is illegal.
|
| 5. Any part of a consent request that violates GDPR is
| itself automatically void: If part of the contract claims
| the company can ignore any future withdrawal, that part
| is invalid and illegal.
|
| [0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-
| collect-pers...
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Thank you.
| golergka wrote:
| They literally employed monkeys as railway signalmen in 19th
| century
| thirdhaf wrote:
| Yes fun story, Jack was an assistant signalman and got paid
| for the job, partially in beer!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)
| dmonitor wrote:
| > James "Jumper" Wide had been known for jumping between
| railcars until an accident where he fell and lost both of
| his legs at the knee
|
| Incredible
| someuser2345 wrote:
| On a darker note, he also tried to use pigeons to help guide
| bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
| Terr_ wrote:
| See-also: "The Feeling of Power" (1958) a short story by
| Isaac Asmiov, which is... related.
|
| https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/1up
| gosub100 wrote:
| at least it could be argued that FOREX traders actually provide
| something of value because they provide liquidity for
| businesses to trade internationally and people to carry their
| wealth between different nations.
|
| I struggle to see the value of publicly traded companies, and
| even more so options and other "exotic vehicles" other than
| enticing people to gamble and make some lucky few people rich.
| I see the corporatization of businesses as harmful to almost
| everybody, including investors who are lied to or denied
| profits from the companies their shares control (but mainly to
| the working class, for humanitarian reasons).
|
| Even capital intensive industries could just borrow money from
| investors, which would bring everything back to reality. build
| the oil rig, or you go into default, thats it. no trickery, no
| growth promises or "pivoting". If you don't make money you go
| out of business. I don't see any need for shareholders.
| xp84 wrote:
| I think what you don't see is that the shareholders are in
| large part pension funds and people saving for retirement. In
| the absence of a wildly higher-tax government pension system,
| which as many other countries have demonstrated, come with
| just as much risk, there isn't a plausible way that I can
| save for retirement without holding stocks. Plus I get to
| pick stocks instead of just hoping the government knows what
| it's doing with my pension dollars.
| multjoy wrote:
| Those investors would be buying shares in the company in all
| but name.
| dumah wrote:
| FOREX volume is almost 10% of annual global GDP _per day_.
|
| This trading is overwhelmingly unrelated to trade in goods or
| services, or the movement of wealth with much permanence.
| gosub100 wrote:
| thats fine, I dont think the amount should be regulated to
| match the good it provides. I just claim that it provides
| some good for the world, whereas equities does not.
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Cool, so speculators are just providing shitloads of
| liquidity to people trading in goods and services. As an
| importer/exporter, I love that FX is so liquid, cheap, and
| easy today.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > at least it could be argued that FOREX traders actually
| provide something of value because they provide liquidity
| [...] I struggle to see the value of publicly traded
| companies
|
| Seeing this A>B comparison made me stop and re-check whether
| it was the introduction to a satirical post.
|
| Many of those companies are actually doing something
| transformative in the world like growing food or inventing
| better mousetraps. That's way more "value" than "providing
| liquidity", regardless of whatever debates we might have
| about who ends up with the rewards.
|
| > Even capital intensive industries could just borrow money
| from investors
|
| Does that mean using shares as collateral for a cash-loan,
| versus selling shares outright?
| voat wrote:
| I believe the op wasn't arguing that companies themselves
| aren't valuable, just the public speculation markets.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I never said the companies shouldn't exist. Try reading
| what I said more carefully since you also misclassified it
| as satire.
| anomaly_ wrote:
| Mate, what on Earth are you talking about? "Even capital
| intensive industries could just borrow money from investors"
| > What do you think publicly traded companies are?
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| xbryanx wrote:
| The Navy's Marine Mammal Program advertises quite an
| interesting array of mine detection techniques using Dophins.
| If this is what they publicly share, who knows what they're
| training animals to do in secret.
|
| https://www.niwcpacific.navy.mil/About/Departments/Intellige...
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Nah, that description is readable. It's not soul crushing if
| you can read it and walk away with a clear understanding what
| the project does.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to
| similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as
| much kindness and dignity as those rats.
|
| I think it's pretty clear from subtext that that is the core
| thrust of the work. ;-)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Brilliant.
|
| Is it though?
|
| Doing unconventional shit with animals: it's obscenity. People
| have been litigating the difference between ordinary obscenity
| and shock art forever. This is an easy call for me.
|
| You can slap a "message" on obscene things and it's a perfectly
| valid way of making art, but I don't think it's brilliant.
| morgango wrote:
| https://archive.is/1WYkr
| polsevev wrote:
| Michael Reeves did it first with his goldfish
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA
| moussore wrote:
| The rat race literally :)
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, imagine the savings in cocaine alone!
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Adderrall these days:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adh...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Tsk. No respect for tradition.
| zahlman wrote:
| (2014)
| K0balt wrote:
| We can add this to my meth fueled cyberneticly outfitted cutlass
| chimpanzees
| keiferski wrote:
| This seems like a great opportunity to share this amusing
| dialogue from _Cosmopolis_ , a Don DeLillo book and its film
| adaptation by David Cronenberg:
|
| _" There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of
| currency."
|
| "Yes. That would be interesting," Chin said.
|
| "Yes. That would impact the world economy."
|
| "The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha."
|
| "The name says everything."
|
| "Yes. The rat," Chin said.
|
| "Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro."
|
| "Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be
| devalued."
|
| "White rats. Think about that."
|
| "Yes. Pregnant rats."
|
| "Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats."
|
| "Britain converts to the rat," Chin said.
|
| "Yes. Joins trend to universal currency."
|
| "Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard."
|
| "Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat."
|
| "Dead rats."
|
| "Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace.*
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyaA3rWWHHs_
| sailfast wrote:
| Yes. Ratcoin virtual rats spike to new high after dead rats
| cause health menace.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Yes. The ratchain.
| itronitron wrote:
| I'd like one strawberry tart without so much rat in it.
| eidorb wrote:
| Yes. Infest the rats' nest.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Yes. all hail King Gizzard
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| Ms.Kleinworth3 had a real gift for stock picking.
|
| It's about the time of the year for the chimps to throw darts at
| the wall and try their luck against wall street
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
| yawpitch wrote:
| Is this really any different than what brokerages have been doing
| for years?
|
| Oh, sorry, _actual_ rats.
| lawlessone wrote:
| 2014. They've probably all been replaced by algorathmic trading
| by now.
| leoc wrote:
| Manhattan-Project styled Big Science megaproject to fully
| simulate a rat brain by 2050 so that it can be trained to trade
| the cable (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_(foreign_exchange) ).
| lucianbr wrote:
| There must be some LLM based trading bot, no? _Must_ be. There
| 's AI toothbrushes for Christ's sake.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I interviewed at Two Sigma in 2018 and got the impression
| they were already getting very deeply into using AI. I'm sure
| they are using LLMs to analyze news articles, etc. I bet a
| high schooler has probably hooked up an LLM to a trading bot.
|
| If you can imagine ANYTHING can be used to gain a market
| edge, there are probably scores of very smart people who are
| trying it/have tried it/have figured out it wouldn't work.
|
| The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big firm
| wouldn't care much about it, or you have special knowledge of
| a technology that most people barely know about.
| gopher_space wrote:
| > The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big
| firm wouldn't care much about it
|
| The interesting part about this is the value of "small".
| asdfman123 wrote:
| True. "Small" can mean many millions of dollars.
| devops99 wrote:
| Rats can drive little cars if you give them the right brain
| computer interface. Rats are gangster.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Brain/computer interface? You can just give them a lever. Rats
| absolutely love driving: https://theconversation.com/im-a-
| neuroscientist-who-taught-r...
|
| So do orangutans, actually, who can easily operate human
| vehicles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY
| dhosek wrote:
| Levers _are_ brain computer interfaces.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I've also heard from people who worked in chemical process
| plants in regions where there are monkeys, that they love to
| turn valves, push buttons and generally imitate human
| operators. So they have to use lots of locks to ensure only
| humans can control the process.
| neom wrote:
| It's been a good year on hackernews, this is I believe my 3rd
| occasion where i get to show off Shadow the Rat's best tricks
| compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
| adriand wrote:
| Is this your vid / your rat? This is insane. Makes me want a
| rat!
| neom wrote:
| Nah that's shadow, the lady who trained her is known in the
| rat world as one of the best trainers. Mine will come when
| they're called, go to their cage when I tell them to, pee
| and poo where they are supposed to, respond to their names
| and some basic spin stuff, but I never bothered to get that
| intense with them (not enough time!)
|
| imo rats are by far the best pet, the only annoying part I
| would say is, as soon as you both start to fall deeply in
| love with each other: they die.
| TomMasz wrote:
| Even better, rats actually _enjoy_ driving tiny cars (https://w
| ww.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/neuroscienti...).
| lukol wrote:
| I wonder if a well trained rat can beat an AI in terms of
| prediction quality per energy spent.
|
| "Buy a bunch of H200s and build a SMR next to the data center?
| Nah, just take these rats and feed them for 3 years."
| lxgr wrote:
| Since learning that pigeons can compete with radiologists in
| terms of accuracy for mammography screenings [1], I'm willing to
| believe almost anything. Turns out neural nets really are pretty
| good at pattern matching/function approximation!
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151
| neom wrote:
| The woman who can smell parkinsons, also fascinating:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell...
| zeristor wrote:
| Thank you, I read about this story years ago, but this is a
| fuller telling of the story.
|
| So much promise but I had not heard of any updates on
| progress on either Parkinson's detection, or the
| identification of the metabolites that make the smell.
|
| This in turn raises another question about the acute sense of
| smell, is this like the people who have four cones in the eye
| and so can see a whole set of colours?
|
| I think this genetic mutation only occurs in women, I guess
| the genetics of olfaction are a lot more complicated.
|
| Should photos be taken to accommodate for these four sets of
| cone colours, adding a new level for RGB? Very few people can
| see it, but there's surely a demand.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| My understanding of tetrachromacy is that it's duplicates
| the red cones, and shifts their sensitivity a very tiny
| amount - the suspicion is that it doesn't meaningfully
| change subjective color perception at all, and at best
| makes tetrachromats very slightly better at distinguishing
| shades of red that would appear identical to us regular
| trichromats.
|
| It would be _very_ exciting if some humans had a mutation
| that let them be sensitive to something further than our
| standard three!
| lxgr wrote:
| There's also a podcast episode with her that I really
| enjoyed:
| https://www.npr.org/2020/03/23/820009335/invisibilia-an-
| unli...
| internet_points wrote:
| It's a whole scientific field:
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=no&as_sdt=7%2C39&q=odo.
| ..
|
| (There was a footnote in Seeing like a State about some
| doctor with an apprentice approaching a house and saying
| "smell this, this is the smell of [some infectious disease]")
| lawlessone wrote:
| Can we train pigeons to spot spam?
| lxgr wrote:
| In my experience they've trained themselves to spot most
| kinds of food very efficiently, but false positives, combined
| with a lack of object permanence, remain a concern.
| lawlessone wrote:
| They have, i was eating subway was once. Had a huge seagull
| right next to be staring into my soul, which is polite as
| far as seagulls go. So i took a piece of lettuce out of the
| sandwich and threw it to him.
|
| Just stared at me, he knew there was meat and he wasn't
| taking anything less.
| aanet wrote:
| _Fantastic_
|
| What a commentary on the traders of today.
|
| "Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
|
| Now that Wall St financiers are studied (chimps, rats), we now
| need a study of Sili Valley VCs.
|
| Rats-as-VCs, yes?
| vdupras wrote:
| Not rats, vultures! Vulture Capitalists is a catchy name!
| samstriker wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12/
|
| -- article by the artist in title
| motohagiography wrote:
| Seems like pulling punches to call this art or a joke. If we can
| simplify the UX on a technology that creates value to where
| animals can use it, that's an amazing technology.
|
| It's likely that we can use AI (not necessary tho) to interpret
| human interfaces to find and create symbolic games with analogous
| dynamics that can be "played" or managed by animals.
|
| doing this for FX is a great insight as that market is relatively
| pure or efficient from an information perspective. Rats are
| interesting, but building this for crows could be a game changer.
| Avian arbitrage.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| If we did it with male cows, it would be quite literally a
| "bull-market".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| pulling punches? not sure you're using that idiom correctly,
| "selling it short" would match better
| motohagiography wrote:
| on the idiom, pulling punches means not following through on
| a criticism, like saying "hah, only joking!" or, "don't
| challenge me it's just art!", where selling it short means
| describing it as less than it could be. They're related, but
| no, I did not misuse an idiom. however, for people whose
| first language isn't english I could accept the idiom is a
| bit opaque for a public forum.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i'm a native english speaker. the reason your usage is
| incorrect is because what you are saying is they didn't
| sufficiently recognize the 'amazing' potential of these
| ideas, the exact opposite of the criticism implied by
| pulling punches.
|
| ask chatgpt or something to arbitrate, i'm confident it
| would agree with me
| motohagiography wrote:
| what the artist created was technology that automates
| traders, and calling it mere art or commentary is pulling
| the punch on the challenge this poses to actual traders.
| consider reading more literature and even writing for
| edited publications before commenting on idiom usage
| again.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you can lead a horse to water... [0]
|
| 0: https://chatgpt.com/share/67648482-c67c-8010-9752-9377
| a5c51e...
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Both your and the other person's phrases are correct, but
| depending on what they're applied to. Calling it a joke
| or art pulls the punch on traders doing the same thing
| and feeling good about their trading skills, while
| calling it just art also sells the technology short as
| far as its capabilities go.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >and create symbolic games with analogous dynamics that can be
| "played" or managed by animals.
|
| Would make for some interesting online games if some of the
| players or NPCs were animals.. (well looked after animals of
| course)
| gosub100 wrote:
| related: Michael Reeves' _I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade
| Stocks_
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA
| dolmen wrote:
| Date: 2014
| joeyo wrote:
| See also: Marzullo, Rantze, and Gage. Stock Market Behavior
| Predicted by Rat Neurons. Annals of Improbable Research. Vol 12,
| No 4. July-August 2006.
| https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/rat...
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| This is quite neat. They translate market numbers into tones and
| the rats make selections on what they think the next tone will
| be. I would say it's actual speculation and not random dart
| throwing like the crypto trading hamster or stock picking
| goldfish we've seen in the recent years.
| fsckboy wrote:
| that's not the financial definition of speculation. The proper
| definition of speculation (by proper I mean "the only one that
| works; all others will be flawed") is "any investment that
| increases the overall risk of your portfolio". (and a hedge is
| "any investment that decreases the overall risk of your
| portfolio".)
|
| neurons predicting the future may be hedging
| lisper wrote:
| "Marcovici says that they were outperforming human traders after
| a few months of training--a claim, though, that'd require testing
| more thorough than what was done here."
|
| Yeah, that's an important hedge there at the end.
|
| Also, I think it's cruel to train the rats with electric shocks
| when they get it wrong.
|
| So while I love this as art and social commentary, the devil is
| still very much to be found in the details.
| beyondCritics wrote:
| If it would actually work, would you use that service? Or would
| you feel some kind of unease?
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