Jan 14, 2020 at 19:00 UTCUpdated Jan 14, 2020 at 19:56 UTC

Matt Hougan image from CoinDesk archives

More than half of financial advisors in the U.S. are too spooked by regulatory uncertainty to initiate or expand their cryptocurrency investments, a new study by Bitwise Asset Management found.

The annual survey, released Tuesday, asked 415 advisors a range of questions on their crypto sentiments, including where they think the market is going, how their clients approach crypto and what it would take for them to invest more in the space. Bitwise found advisors are increasingly bullish on bitcoins future but hesitant to invest in it for their clients or themselves.

Bitwise conducted the survey in December.

Only 6 percent of respondents currently invest clients' funds in crypto assets, and the holdouts largely plan to continue avoiding crypto in 2020; 55 percent said they will probably or definitely not invest in crypto this year, while only 7 percent said they probably or definitely will.

The survey found a notable slice of fence-sitters, too: 38 percent are unsure what theyll do this year, which is significant, said Matt Hougan, Bitwises global head of research, who conducted the survey.

Advisors are intrigued by cryptos proven history of delivering uncorrelated returns or high returns, Hougan said. However, many continue to balk at investing, largely because of regulatory uncertainty and questions of access.

Fifty-six percent of respondents said regulatory concerns are preventing them from embracing crypto assets. This is despite what Bitwise describes as significant progress in the crypto regulatory space in 2019, including action by New Yorks Department of Financial Services and steps toward a regulated bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

Respondents are looking at the regulatory landscape. According to the 2019 figures, 42 percent indicated regulation was their top concern, while, looking ahead, this year a majority, or 58 percent, said better regulation could spur them to invest.

Hougan said even small increases in investors crypto allocations could be a boon for the market overall. He said advisors control $24 trillion in assets, dwarfing bitcoins current market cap of about $160 billion.

Crypto people are over-focused on institutions as the next wave of adopters and under-focused on advisors, who control just as much as the institutions, he said.

The survey finds advisors increasingly think bitcoin is on the rise. Sixty-four percent project it will add value by 2025, while 8 percent think the market will crash by years end.

Their clients, too, seem to show notable interest in cryptos future and sometimes outside of their relationships with the fiduciary; 35 percent of advisors believe that some of their clients are investing in crypto themselves. A far larger slice of the advisors 76 percent said they fielded clients crypto questions in the past year.

Hougan said advisors attitudes towards the market made strides through 2019; compared to the nadir of December 2018, when bitcoins price made historic lows, advisors are more positive this year.

Last year people were not sure if crypto would survive. Now people are more confident, he said.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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More Than Half of Financial Advisors Want Better Regulation Before Investing in Crypto - CoinDesk

Yet stocks remain near all-time highs. It's not necessarily the wisest time to take your money out of the market.

Fortunately, there are several so-called minimum or low volatility exchange-traded funds from such respected money management firms as Fidelity, BlackRock, Invesco and others of their ilk.

These and many other low and minimum volatility ETFs offer investors a mix of value stocks that have some of the characteristics of safer bonds, said Troy Gayeski, co-chief investment officer at SkyBridge. They should benefit from a flight to safety.

Financial stocks are another group that may benefit from low volatility. Banks have outperformed the broader market in four out of five recent periods of low volatility, according to KBW analyst Fred Cannon.

As a result, Gayeski said investors could be missing out on bigger gains by shunning riskier parts of the stock market, such as tech, in favor of stodgy, dependable dividend payers.

The US-China trade agreement, due to be signed this week, could keep the broader market rally going for some time. That means that now may not be the right time to adopt a more prudent, risk-averse strategy.

"It's too early to be defensive. The 'phase one' China deal may not be a Kumbaya-let's-hug-each-other moment, but it stops things from escalating further," Gayeski said.

Others argue that the market won't remain this sanguine indefinitely.

"Low volatility can't last forever," KBW's Cannon wrote in a report last Friday.

To that end, adding more consumer companies, health care stocks, real estate firms, utilities and financial services companies to your portfolio could make sense.

Dividend yields should become an increasingly important generator of market returns if things suddenly become more noisy.

"I understand why people are anxious. We are getting late in this economic cycle. People are opting for some good old-fashioned dividend players," said John Norris, managing director of wealth and investments for Oakworth Capital Bank.

Norris told CNN Business he's "astonished" by how quickly Iran has vanished from the financial news headlines. But he added there are still question marks about the health of earnings, the Federal Reserve's rate policy and a potential economic slowdown.

"You should see more normal levels of volatility this year," Norris said.

With that in mind, it may make sense for investors to favor blue chip stocks in more stable sectors, says Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist with Prudential Financial.

Krosby argues that there is still uncertainty about what will happen with the United States and China even after a preliminary trade deal is signed.

She added that CEOs and CFOs may hold off on some key business decisions until the outcome of the presidential election becomes clearer. A more progressive Democratic candidate could spell trouble for the health care, retail and tech sectors.

"Is there an all clear signal for the broader market? No. You're going to have to take things quarter by quarter," Krosby said. "That's why it will be important to focus on quality companies with strong cash flows and steady dividends."

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How to stay invested if you're a worrier - CNN

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Forget Penny Stocks -- Here's the Best Way to Invest $20 - The Motley Fool

Are you hoping to increase your retirement account contributions in 2020? That's a great financial goal, since many Americans are saving far too little.

Saving for retirement in a tax-advantaged account such as a 401(k) or an IRA is the best way for most people to prepare for their golden years. Investing costs less when the money you set aside for it lowers your taxable income and decreases your eventual bill from the IRS.There are annual limits to the tax-advantaged contributions you can make, but these limits went up in 2020.

Image source: Getty Images.

The table below shows the maximum you can personally contribute to different kinds of retirement savings accounts in 2020. This is separate from any employer contributions, which are subject to a different limit.

While there are no income limits for making 401(k) or Simple IRA contributions, there are some income-based restrictions for traditional and Roth IRAs.

Employers are also allowed to make contributions to your retirement accounts for you. These are subject to a separate limit and employer contributions don't affect how much you can personally contribute.

The table below shows the maximum contributions employers can make in 2020.

Often, employers match a percentage of the contributions you make to your own 401(k) or Simple IRA. For example, your company may match 50% of your 401(k) contributions up to a maximum of 4% of your salary.

If your employer offers this help, you should contribute enough to earn the maximum match, or you'll be leaving free money on the table.

Now you know the maximum you can contribute to tax-advantaged retirement accounts in 2020. You should aim to contribute as much as possible to them. If you have enough money to max them out, you'll be well on your way to a secure future.

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What Are the Maximum Limits for Investing in Your Retirement Savings Accounts in 2020? - The Motley Fool

Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City is not going anywhere anytime soon and will invest more money into its boardwalk facility despite issues the CEO said he has with the city.

During the first of two employee town hall sessions held at the Mark G. Etess Arena in Atlantic City Thursday morning, Hard Rock CEO Jim Allen announced the company would invest $15 million more in capital improvements in 2020 at the hotel and casino. Among the upgrades will be renovations to the ballroom, suites, and adding additional restrooms. The $15 million is on top of the initial $562 million investment in the beachfront hotel. Allen also said despite rumors floating around, Hard Rock is currently not looking at purchasing the adjacent Showboat property.

Allen told employees the company was giving 2,782 full-time employees, union and non-union, a minimum $250 bonus as a way to give back to its employees. The bonuses to be doled out will total more than $2 million. Allen said the bonuses were a way to thank the employees for the job they have done thus far.

We are going above and beyond and not just giving the holiday turkey, gift cards, and all those things that we do, but we wanted to put cash in their pocket and show them that we are putting our money where our mouth is, Allen said. We want to deliver the best product in Atlantic City, and we want them to have the entrepreneurial spirit so that they go the extra step. This is a sign of our thanks and appreciation.

Jim Allen, chairman of Hard Rock International and CEO of Seminole Gaming, right, talks to Marcellus Osceola Jr., chairman of Seminole Tribe of Florida, during a town hall meeting in Hard Rock Live at Etess Arena in Atlantic City, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2020.Tim Hawk | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Although the company has invested millions in the resort town, Allen said he wishes the city and state would do more to help spur more growth in Atlantic City, including improved safety and more efficient traffic signals around the resort town.

Frankly the towns in worse shape today than it was when we bought the building, he said.

He noted the street lights have been out for two months on several blocks along Pacific Avenue, a sign of a continuing trend that concerns him.

When youre in a resort environment where safety and security is so important, if the city cant get something fixed as simple as the street lighting, then maybe a change is needed, he said.

Allen also specifically referenced the state of the properties at the vacant Trump Plaza and Sands Casinos, even suggesting officials use the enforcement of eminent domain to force the property owners to maintain their holdings.

Carl (Ichan) is worth how many billions of dollars? Allen asked. To leave a vacant casino like that sitting, that is a safety hazard with debris falling off the building potentially hurting someone. I do not know why the city and Carl cant come together. I hear that they are in some form of negotiations. We work with Carl. He and his CEO are fine people, but we do not understand why that building is still there. And rather than finding out what happened at the Sands where it is a field full of weeds and a chain-link fence that looks like it is at a prison, do something to make it at least look nice. Nothing. Nobody does anything.

The Hard Rock Casino finished with the second highest amount of revenue in both slot and table games, garnering $324 million. The hotel also received $62 million in hotel revenue.

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Hard Rock says it will continue to invest in Atlantic City despite concerns - NJ.com

In the opening pages of the curator James Meyers new book, The Art of Return: The Sixties and Contemporary Culture, we find ourselves on Marthas Vineyard in August 1971. It is the Summer of Love, and a mania for nude swimming and sunbathing has overtaken the beaches.

Meyer and a friend, determined to prove our independence, break free from their families and decide to hitchhike across the island. They walk and walk until theyre finally picked up by a man driving a VW bus. He has a beard, long hair, and he shouts,Come on in!

Meyer is only nine years old.

So begins the art historians perceptive study of the long 1960s (which actually covers roughly 1955 through 1975), and why that era continues to animate the imagination of artists, writers, and historianseven if, like Meyer, they mostly missed the period in question.

The books impressive sweep, which looks at 20 international artists, is motivated by a range of probing questions. What purpose do historical reenactments serve? How do events from past eras shade our understanding of the present? What are artists doing when they remember moments from before they were even born?

Artnet News spoke with Meyer, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, about the books genesis, his turn toFriedrich Nietzsche, and how todays right-wing politics grew from reactions against 1960s progressivism.

Anri Sala, still fromIntervista (Finding the Words) (1998). Courtesy of Idale Audience International, Paris; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin; Galerie Rdiger Schttle, Munich; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

What would you describe as the greatest challenge of the book?

Figuring out the topic itself. What I am writing about? What is the 60s return? How do you define it? How do you understand that history is not static, that it impacts later periods or bleeds into them?

My earlier workmy books on Minimalism and my exhibition on the history of the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New Yorkreflected a structuralist understanding of history as a set of discursive, economic, and institutional conditions specific to their time. This book understands the long 60sthe period stretching from the mid-50s to the mid-70sas over and not over, a past that is not past.

Nietzsche, in his essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, proposes that history is a dynamic force. It can be a chain that binds us to the past, and a model of emulation. How we perceive the past has a great bearing on how we live now. As he says, we need to strike a balance between remembering and forgetting. It is vitally important to remember, yet not to the degree that we get stuck in the past. I discuss Kerry James Marshalls paintings about Civil Rights-era memory, the Souvenirs, along these lines.

Kerry James Marshall, Memento V (2003). Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri. Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

What about inserting yourself into the narrative? You write about your childhood early in the book. Was that difficult?

It was a challenge to write myself into the story. It was counterintuitive to my training to inscribe my voicemy memory and nostalgia for a period I experienced before I could understand what was happening around meinto my work. It turned out to be at the very core of what the book is about.

My generationthe children of the 60s and 70swas deeply impacted by what now appears to us as the last revolutionary period on a global scale. Revolutionary eras produce a surfeit of memory. They last longer because theyre more traumatic and more impactful than more quiescent eras. They return. I was forced to consider how my experiencethe impressions of childhood we each havehad inflected my research, and the work of so many others: why it is that so many artists, writers, scholars, and filmmakers of my generation, give or take 10 years, have felt compelled to revisit that time? The more I looked into it the more I realized the phenomenon is international and quite broad. My book discusses more than 20 figures from the US, UK, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. I considered 90.

Martha Rosler, Election (Lynndie), from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004). Photomontage. Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

In the book, you make a number of connections between the George W. Bush years, with the Iraq War, and the turmoil of the 60s. What are the connections between the long 60s and the moment were living in now?

The most obvious connection is between Watergate and the growing scandal involving Russia and Ukraine. The adjective Nixonian comes up a lot, and you see Watergate-era veteransJohn Dean, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, and so onon TV regularly. What we have come to understand is this isnt Watergate. Practices of return, as I call them, force us to see the differences between then and now. The misinformation campaign and hacking of the DNC server by Russian state intelligence was a highly successful espionage action by a foreign government, damaging to the Clinton campaign and US democracy. The impact is ongoing. A failed burglary in DC seems almost quaint in comparison.

Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (ca. 196772). Martha Rosler. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

The book was written over the course of a number of years. Were you ever concerned that its relevance might expire in the gap between writing and the books ultimate publication?

Just imagine, my first essay on the subject was published in 1998! I was indeed worried that the book would lose its contemporaneity. What I discovered in the course of writing it is the very point the book makes: there is the historical 60s, a period that came to an end, and a 60s that returns, each time differently, depending on whats happening in the current moment. It doesnt go away.

During the Bush era, comparisons were made between the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and between the anti-war movement and the relative lack of activism on campuses during the 2000s, connections I explore in works by Martha Rosler, Nancy Davenport, and Matthew Buckingham. Watergate is clearly germane right now. But it is important to recognize that the fissures we are experiencing between red and blue electorates came into play then, with the emergence of the New Left, identity politics, and Johnsons Great Society programs, on the one hand, and the rise of Nixons Silent Majority on the other.

One could say that the reactionary turns since the 60santi-busing during the 70s, the election of Reagan in 1980, the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and Trumpism in 2016are extensions of that division. Right-wing efforts to disenfranchise voters of color, the Supreme Courts 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the administrations efforts to curtail the Immigration Act of 1965 are other attempts to repeal the progressive gains of the 60s.

Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler, T.S.O.Y.W. (2007). Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler.

What about the other side of the battle? Are there connections between the popular movements of the 60s and the movements of today?

The Civil Rights, anti-war, feminist, and LGBTQ movements emerged then; each had a powerful constituency that developed around a particular issue. One can hope that climate politics and the Black Lives Matter and gun-control movements will be so impactful.

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How We Perceive the Past Has a Great Bearing on How We Live Now: Art Historian James Meyer on Why the 1960s Wont Fade Away - artnet News

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

By: Nolen Gertz

Nihilism, not unlike time (according to Augustine) or porn (according to the U.S. Supreme Court), is one of those concepts that we are all pretty sure we know the meaning of unless someone asks us to define it. Nihil means nothing. -ism means ideology. Yet when we try to combine these terms, the combination seems to immediately refute itself, as the idea that nihilism is the ideology of nothing appears to be nonsensical. To say that this means that someone believes in nothing is not really much more helpful, as believing in something suggests there is something to be believed in, but if that something is nothing, then there is not something to be believed in, in which case believing in nothing is again a self-refuting idea.

It is easy therefore to fall into the trap of thinking Everything is nihilism! which of course leads to thinking Nothing is nihilism! Thus in order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it is necessary to distinguish it from concepts that are often associated with it but are nevertheless different, concepts such as pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

If optimism is hopefulness, then pessimism is hopelessness. To be a pessimist is to say, Whats the point? Pessimism is often likened to a Glass is half empty way of seeing the world, but since its only half empty this scenario might still be too hopeful for a pessimist. A better scenario might be that, if a pessimist fell in a well, and someone offered to rescue him, hed likely respond, Why bother? In the well, out of the well, were all going to die anyway. In other words, pessimism is dark and depressing. But it is not nihilism.

If a pessimist fell in a well, and someone offered to rescue him, hed likely respond, Why bother? In the well, out of the well, were all going to die anyway.

In fact, we might even go so far as to say that pessimism is the opposite of nihilism. Like nihilism, pessimism could be seen as arising from despair. The fact of our death, the frustration of our desires, the unintended consequences of our actions, the tweets of our political leaders, any or all of these could lead us to either nihilism or pessimism. However, where these two roads diverge is over the question of whether we dwell on our despair or hide from it.

To be with a pessimist is to know that you are with a pessimist. But you can be with a nihilist and have no idea. Indeed you could yourself be a nihilist and have no idea. Such a lack of awareness is the point of nihilism, as nihilism is all about hiding from despair rather than dwelling on it. This difference was illustrated by Woody Allen in his movie Annie Hall (1977) when his alter ego Alvy Singer has the following exchange with a couple he stops on the street for advice:

ALVY (He moves up the sidewalk to a young trendy-looking couple, arms wrapped around each other): You-you look like a really happy couple. Uh, uh are you?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah.

ALVY: Yeah! So h-h-how do you account for it?

YOUNG WOMAN: Uh, Im very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.

YOUNG MAN: And Im exactly the same way.

ALVY: I see. Well, thats very interesting. So youve managed to work out something, huh?

YOUNG MAN: Right.

Alvy Singer is a pessimist. The man and woman are nihilists.

What is most illuminating about this scene is that it shows how a pessimist can reveal the identity of a nihilist, just as it might be argued that the pessimism of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer helped reveal to Nietzsche his own nihilism. Before they are confronted by Alvy, they are just a happily shallow and happily empty couple. However, when he asks them to explain their happiness, they are no longer shallow and empty; they are instead forced to awaken from their reverie and to become self-aware. It is not that they are happy that reveals their nihilism; rather it is their attempt to explain to a pessimist why they are happy that reveals their nihilism. On the surface, they are soul mates who have found each other. But surface is all that they are. The attempt to go any deeper reveals that there is nothing deeper. And it is precisely a pessimist who, when confronted with such a happy couple, would ask the Why? that reveals their nothingness.

If, as I suggested earlier, nihilism and pessimism are opposites, then nihilism is actually much closer to optimism. To see the glass as half full is to think that we should be happy with what we have rather than focusing on what is missing. But being happy with what we have can also be a way of remaining complacent, of ignoring what is missing so as to avoid having to seek change. Similarly, to believe that everything will work out in the end, that there is always light at the end of the tunnel, is to believe that life is teleological, that there is some goal or purpose whether God or Justice operating invisibly behind what we experience.

It is by believing in the existence of superhuman goals and superhuman purposes that we lose sight of human goals and human purposes. Likewise, when we elevate someone like Martin Luther King Jr. to the status of a saint or a prophet, we see him as more than a mere mortal, thus freeing ourselves from the responsibility of trying to emulate him since we simply have to be hopeful that someone like him will come again. If optimism leads us to be complacent, leads us to wait for something good to happen, or for someone else to make something good happen, then optimism leads us to do nothing. In other words, it is not pessimism but optimism that is similar to nihilism.

In Ancient Greece, a Cynic was someone who lived like a dog (the Greek kynikos means doglike), or, to be more precise, was someone who lived by the Cynic philosophy of staying true to nature rather than conforming to what that person saw as social artifice. Today, a cynic is similarly someone who looks down on society and sees it as fake, though not because the cynic sees society as unnatural, but because the cynic sees the people who make up society as fake. To be cynical is to assume the worst of people, to think that morality is mere pretense, and to suppose that even when people seem to be helping others they are really only trying to help themselves. Believing in only self-interest, the cynic appears to others to believe in nothing. Consequently, cynicism can appear to be nihilism. But it is not nihilism.

A cynic can even enjoy life. In particular, a cynic can take pleasure in mocking those who claim that altruism exists, or that politicians are self-sacrificing public servants, and especially finds laughable the idea that we should try to see the good in people.

Cynicism, like pessimism, is about negativity. However, whereas pessimism is about despair, about the feeling that life is pointless in the face of death, cynicism is instead much more about disdain than despair. A cynic wouldnt say that life is pointless but would just say that what people claim about life is pointless. A cynic can even enjoy life. In particular, a cynic can take pleasure in mocking those who claim that altruism exists, or that politicians are self-sacrificing public servants, and especially finds laughable the idea that we should try to see the good in people.

Pessimists are not nihilists because pessimists embrace rather than evade despair. Cynics are not nihilists because cynics embrace rather than evade mendacity. A key part of evading despair is the willingness to believe, to believe that people can be good, that goodness is rewarded, and that such rewards can exist even if we do not experience them. But to a cynic such a willingness to believe is a willingness to be naive, to be gullible, and to be manipulated. The cynic mocks such beliefs not because the cynic claims to know that such beliefs are necessarily false, but because the cynic is aware of the danger represented by people who claim to know that such beliefs are necessarily true.

A skeptic waits for evidence before passing judgment. A cynic, however, does not trust evidence because the cynic does not trust that anyone is capable of providing evidence objectively.

A skeptic waits for evidence before passing judgment. A cynic, however, does not trust evidence because the cynic does not trust that anyone is capable of providing evidence objectively. The cynic would prefer to remain dubious than risk being duped, and thus the cynic sees those who do take such risks as dupes. For this reason the cynic is able to reveal the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of cynicism, much like how the pessimist reveals the nihilism of others by challenging people to defend their lack of pessimism.

Perhaps the best example of the revelatory abilities of a cynic is the argument between Thrasymachus and Socrates in the opening book of Platos Republic. Thrasymachus is first introduced as mocking Socrates for questioning others about the definition of justice and then demands that he be paid in order to tell them what justice truly is. Once appeased, Thrasymachus defines justice as a trick invented by the strong in order to take advantage of the weak, as a way for the strong to seize power by manipulating society into believing that obedience is justice. Thrasymachus further argues that whenever possible people do what is unjust, except when they are too afraid of being caught and punished, and thus Thrasymachus concludes that injustice is better than justice.

When Socrates attempts to refute this definition by likening political leaders to doctors, to those who have power but use it to help others rather than to help themselves, Thrasymachus does not accept the refutation like the others do, but instead refutes Socratess refutation. Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of being naive and argues that Socrates is like a sheep who thinks the shepherd who protects and feeds the sheep does so because the shepherd is good rather than realizing that the shepherd is fattening them for the slaughter. Socrates is never able to truly convince Thrasymachus that his definition of justice is wrong, and indeed Thrasymachuss cynicism is so compelling that Socrates spends the rest of the Republic trying to prove that justice is better than injustice by trying to refute the apparent success of unjust people by making metaphysical claims about the effects of injustice on the soul. Socrates is thus only able to counter cynicism in the visible world through faith in the existence of an invisible world, an invisible world that he argues is more real than the visible world. In other words, it is Thrasymachuss cynicism that forces Socrates to reveal his nihilism.

Here we can see that nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than to cynicism. The cynic presents himself or herself as a realist, as someone who cares about actions, not intentions, who focuses on what people do rather than on what people hope to achieve, who remembers the failed promises of the past in order to avoid being swept up in the not-yet-failed promises about the future. The idealist, however, rejects cynicism as hopelessly negative. By focusing on intentions, on hopes, and on the future, the idealist is able to provide a positive vision to oppose the negativity of the cynic. But in rejecting cynicism, does the idealist also reject reality?

Nihilism is actually much more closely related to idealism than to cynicism.

The idealist, as we saw with Socrates, is not able to challenge the cynics view of reality and instead is forced to construct an alternate reality, a reality of ideas. These ideas may form a coherent logical story about reality, but that in no way guarantees that the ideas are anything more than just a story. As the idealist focuses more and more on how reality ought to be, the idealist becomes less and less concerned with how reality is. The utopian views of the idealist may be more compelling than the dystopian views of the cynic, but dystopian views are at least focused on this world, whereas utopian views are, by definition, focused on a world that does not exist. It is for this reason that to use other-worldly idealism to refute this-worldly cynicism is to engage in nihilism.

Along with pessimism and cynicism, nihilism is also frequently associated with apathy. To be apathetic is to be without pathos, to be without feeling, to be without desire. While we are all occasionally given choices that do not particularly sway us one way or another (Do you want to eat Italian or Chinese?), such disinterestedness is what someone who is apathetic feels all the time. To be apathetic is thus to be seen as not caring about anything. The pessimist feels despair, the cynic feels disdain, but the apathetic individual feels nothing. In other words, apathy is seen as nihilism. But apathy is not nihilism.

The pessimist feels despair, the cynic feels disdain, but the apathetic individual feels nothing.

Apathy can be an attitude (I dont care about that) or a character trait (I dont care about anything). However, in either case the apathetic individual is expressing a personal feeling (or, to be more precise, feelinglessness) and is not making a claim about how everyone should feel (or, again, not feel). The apathetic individual understands perfectly well that other people feel differently insofar as they feel anything at all. And because the apathetic individual feels nothing, the apathetic individual does not feel any desire to convince others that they should similarly feel nothing. Others may care, but the apathetic individual does not, and because they do not care, the apathetic individual does not care that others care.

Yet apathy is still often seen as an affront, as an insult, as a rebuke by those who do care. For example, in MTVs Daria (19972002) a show about a highly apathetic high schooler Daria Morgendorffer and her friend Jane Lane have the following conversation:

DARIA: Tragedy hits the school and everyone thinks of me. A popular guy died, and now Im popular because Im the misery chick. But Im not miserable. Im just not like them.

JANE: It really makes you think.

DARIA: Funny. Thanks a lot.

JANE: No! Thats why they want to talk to you. When they say, Youre always unhappy, Daria, what they mean is, You think, Daria. I can tell because you dont smile. Now this guy died and it makes me think and that hurts my little head and makes me stop smiling. So, tell me how you cope with thinking all the time, Daria, until I can get back to my normal vegetable state.

DARIA: Okay. So why have you been avoiding me?

JANE: Because Ive been trying not to think.

The apathetic individual can thus, like the pessimist and the cynic, reveal the nihilism of others, though, unlike the pessimist and the cynic, the apathetic individual does this without actually trying to. Whereas the pessimist and the cynic challenge others to explain their lack of either pessimism or cynicism, the apathetic individual is instead the one who is challenged, challenged by others to explain his or her lack of pathos. In trying to get the apathetic individual to care, the person who does care is forced to explain why he or she cares, an explanation which can reveal just how meaningful (or meaningless) is the reason the person has for caring.

The apathetic individual doesnt care. However, not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But the nihilist has feelings. Its just that what the nihilist has feelings for is itself nothing. And indeed it is because the nihilist is able to have such strong feelings, strong feelings for something that is nothing, that the nihilist is not and cannot be apathetic. Nihilists can have sympathy, empathy, and antipathy, but they cannot have apathy.

Not caring is not the same thing as caring about nothing. The apathetic individual feels nothing. But the nihilist has feelings.

Nietzsche tried to demonstrate the feelings at work in nihilism in his argument against what he called the morality of pity. The morality of pity holds that it is good to feel pity for those who are in need, and it is especially good to be moved by such pity to help those who are in need. But, according to Nietzsche, what is often motivating the desire to help is how we are able to see ourselves thanks to how we see others in need, in particular how we see ourselves as capable of helping, as powerful enough to help.

The morality of pity is for Nietzsche not about helping others, but about elevating oneself by reducing others, by reducing others to their neediness, to a neediness that we do not have and that reveals how much we do have by contrast. Pity is nihilistic insofar as it allows us to evade reality, such as by allowing us to feel that we are better than we are, and that we are better than those in need. Consequently, we are able to avoid recognizing that we have perhaps only had better luck or have been more privileged.

The morality of pity drives us to feel pity and to feel good for feeling pity. Having such feelings is worse than feeling nothing, for if we feel good when we feel pity, then we are motivated only to help the individuals we feel pity for rather than to help end the systemic injustices that create such pitiful situations in the first place. Whereas apathy may help us to avoid being blinded by our emotions and to see situations of injustice more clearly, pity is instead more likely to motivate us to perpetuate injustice by perpetuating the conditions that allow us to help the needy, that allow us to see ourselves as good for helping those we see only as needy.

This is not to suggest, however, that we should try to achieve apathy, that we should try to will ourselves to feel nothing. Popular versions of Stoicism and of Buddhism advocate for calmness, for detachment, for trying to not feel what we feel. To force oneself to become apathetic is nihilistic, as to do so is to evade our feelings rather than to confront them. There is thus an important difference between being apathetic and becoming apathetic, between being indifferent because that is how one responds to the world and becoming indifferent because we want to be liberated from our feelings and attachments. Similarly, to become detached, not because of Stoicism or Buddhism, but because of hipsterism, is still to try to detach oneself from oneself, from life, from reality. So pursuing irony can be just as nihilistic as pursuing apatheia or nirvana.

Nolen Gertz is Assistant Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and author of Nihilism, from which this article is excerpted.

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What Nihilism Is Not - The MIT Press Reader

The key to success has less to do with obsessing over consuming the 'right kinds' of materials and more to do with how you use what you learn.

January 17, 2020 6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

"I realized that becoming a master of karate was not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times. Chet Holmes

How can we make learning our default mode?

According to Holmes, its not about amassing random knowledge or memorizing copious amounts of information. Its about turning what we absorb into strategic action.

Many entrepreneurs get stuck believing they should acquire as much knowledge as possible or become a human Wikipedia. Its now easier than ever to Google anything our heart desires, but all of this rapid browsing gives us the illusion that were processing more than we actually are. True learning, on the other hand, goes far beyond hoarding facts.

In fact, Plato made the case against simply memorizing data: Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind, he said.

Its not the same thing to spend a single afternoon studying how to meditate, for example, as it is to make it a daily practice. Sheer knowledge alone is often powerless. Bruce Lee understood this more than anyone: Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Thats why we cant settle for skimming over the surface of information, we have to cultivate the habit of digging deep and immersing ourselves in new experiences.

This is what allows our thinking to grow more elastic and less rigid, and which ultimately lets us generate new and original ideas.

Related: How Studying History Brings Success

A Harvard Business Review story by John Coleman illustrates the need to prioritize learning. He writes: Were all born with a natural curiosity. We want to learn. But the demands of work and personal life often diminish our time and will to engage that natural curiosity.

As someone who is constantly pulled in every direction, I know what its like to end up pushing things to the backburner. In the early days of building JotForm, having a busy calendar meant that I was always balancing my personal life with working toward my dream.

All of my free time went toward my family or company, and precious few hours were dedicated to reading and practicing what I absorbed. But its important to remember that creating anything of meaning comes from continuous, deliberate learning of what we take in on a daily basis.

For a long time, I made excuses for not reading and researching material that wasnt related to my work. But at a certain point, I realized that in order to become a more open-minded, creative and innovative leader, I had to make learning a lifelong habit. Here are four ways to do it.

Related:Don't Learn More, Learn Smarter. A Quick Guide to Agile Learning.

What are some concepts, thoughtsand practices youd like to explore? Having a variety of passions plays an important role in maintaining our interest, but the goal of learning should be to push us beyond our comfort zone. Part of this involves discomfort, and thats a good thing.

In order to manage and overcome mental barriers, we should have a firm understanding of our own limitations, and what wed like to change.

Heres something to keep in mind: you should learn more about the things that matter to you. What excites you. But also about what challenges your beliefs and previous ways of thinking.

Instead of spending your free time catching up on the latest Netflix show, actively seek out opportunities to stay up-to-date with growth opportunities.

Getting rid of distractions is a good rule of thumb when learning new material, but also focus on setting aside small, regular time allotments. This means setting up realistic goals like leaving your phone in another room for a 30-minute block of time.

Consuming knowledge in these bite-sized quantities gives your mind time to process and recover from intense concentration.

But remember: its the repetition that counts. The most successful entrepreneurs all share the same trait: they focus on a handful of practices and rinse and repeat until gaining mastery. American essayist and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, agrees:

That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased.

Related:Why You Should Strive to Be a Lifelong Learner

No matter where you are on your journey, turning to a community of like-minded individuals can help make learning fun and exciting. Whether you participate in online or offline courses, you can gain more insight by connecting with other learners.

Engaging and participating in activities with people that are better than us can also give us opportunities to examine our beliefs and expand our thinking. Were also able to learn from others experiences and providevalue to them in return.

Make specific goals of joining a group or signing up for a formal class on what interests you. Knowing that you have a community to share notes with and provide you with feedback can keep you on track.

Lifelong learners understand that smart goal setting means increasing our learning agility, or our ability to take knowledge from one concept and apply it to another.

Understandably, most of us will automatically think that the knowledge and skills directly related to our work should take priority. If you stick to reading business books, the thinking goes, youll have better results.

But what Ive discovered about being a lifetime learner is that significant progress can only be made by translating diverse concepts and applying them to my role as a leader. Regularly practicing a few minutes of meditation every day, for instance, creates a domino effect by helping me cultivate patience and awareness in other areas of my business.

Its a lesson every founder can understand. The key to success has less to do with obsessing over consuming the right kinds of materials, and more to do with how you use what you learn. This is what ultimately gives us a fresh perspective.

Simply put: Keep growing and dont settle.

Or to quote Friedrich Nietzsche The doer alone learneth.

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Why Lifelong Learning is the Key to Entrepreneurial Success - Entrepreneur

A team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark let DeepMinds AlphaZero algorithm loose on a few quantum computing optimization problems and, much to everyones surprise, the AI was able to solve the problems without any outside expert knowledge. Not bad for a machine learning paradigm designed to win at games like Chess and StarCraft.

Youve probably heard of DeepMind and its AI systems. The UK-based Google sister-company is responsible for both AlphaZero and AlphaGo, the systems that beat the worlds most skilled humans at the games of Chess and Go. In essence, what both systems do is try to figure out what the optimal next set of moves is. Where humans can only think so many moves ahead, the AI can look a bit further using optimized search and planning methods.

Related:DeepMinds AlphaZero AI is the new champion in chess, shogi, and Go

When the Aarhus team applied AlphaZeros optimization abilities to a trio of problems associated with optimizing quantum functions an open problem for the quantum computing world they learned that its ability to learn new parameters unsupervised transferred over from games to applications quite well.

Per the study:

AlphaZero employs a deep neural network in conjunction with deep lookahead in a guided tree search, which allows for predictive hidden-variable approximation of the quantum parameter landscape. To emphasize transferability, we apply and benchmark the algorithm on three classes of control problems using only a single common set of algorithmic hyperparameters.

The implications for AlphaZeros mastery over the quantum universe could be huge. Controlling a quantum computer requires an AI solution because operations at the quantum level quickly become incalculable by humans. The AI can find optimum paths between data clusters in order to emerge better solutions in tandem with computer processors. It works a lot like human heuristics, just scaled to the nth degree.

An example of this would be an algorithm that helps a quantum computer sort through near-infinite combinations of molecules to come up with chemical compounds that would be useful in the treatment of certain illnesses. The current paradigm would involve developing an algorithm that relies on human expertise and databases with previous findings to point it in the right direction.

But the kind of problems were looking at quantum computers to solve dont always have a good starting point. Some of these, optimization problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem, need an algorithm thats capable of figuring things out without the need for constant adjustment by developers.

DeepMinds algorithm and AI system may be the solution quantum computings been waiting for. The researchers effectively employ AlphaZero as a Tabula Rasa for quantum optimization: It doesnt necessarily need human expertise to find the optimum solution to a problem at the quantum computing level.

Before we start getting too concerned about unsupervised AI accessing quantum computers, its worth mentioning that so far AlphaZeros just solved a few problems in order to prove a concept. We know the algorithms can handle quantum optimization, now its time to figure out what we can do with it.

The researchers have already received interest from big tech and other academic institutions with queries related to collaborating on future research. Not for nothing, but DeepMinds sister-company Google has a little quantum computing program of its own. Were betting this isnt the last weve heard of AlphaZeros adventures in the quantum computing world.

Read next: Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed to September (thank goodness)

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AlphaZero beat humans at Chess and StarCraft, now it's working with quantum computers - The Next Web

The recent commercial AI revolution has been largely driven by deep neural networks. First invented in the 1960s, deep NNs came into their own once fueled by the combination of internet-scale datasets and distributed GPU farms.

But the field of AI is much richer than just this one type of algorithm. Symbolic reasoning algorithms such as artificial logic systems, also pioneered in the 60s, may be poised to emerge into the spotlight to some extent perhaps on their own, but also hybridized with neural networks in the form of so-called neural-symbolic systems.

Deep neural nets have done amazing things for certain tasks, such as image recognition and machine translation. However, for many more complex applications, traditional deep learning approaches cannot match the ability of hybrid architecture systems that additionally leverage other AI techniques such as probabilistic reasoning, seed ontologies, and self-reprogramming ability.

Deep neural networks, by themselves, lack strong generalization, i.e. discovering new regularities and extrapolating beyond training sets. Deep neural networks interpolate and approximate on what is already known, which is why they cannot truly be creative in the sense that humans can, though they can produce creative-looking works that vary on the data they have ingested.

This is why large training sets are required to teach deep neural networks and also why data augmentation is such an important technique for deep learning, which needs humans to specify known data transformations. Even interpolation cannot be done perfectly without learning underlying regularities, which is vividly demonstrated by well-known adversarial attacks on deep neural networks.

The slavish adherence of deep neural nets to the particulars of their training data also makes them poorly interpretable. Humans cannot completely rely or interpret their results, especially in novel situations.

What is interesting is that, for the most part, the disadvantages of deep neural nets are strengths of symbolic systems (and vice versa), which inherently possess compositionality, interpretability, and can exhibit true generalization. Prior knowledge can also be easily incorporated into symbolic systems in contrast to neural nets.

Neural net architectures are very powerful at certain types of learning, modeling, and action but have limited capability for abstraction. That is why they are compared with the Ptolemaic epicycle model of our solar system they can become more and more precise, but they need more and more parameters and data for this, and they, by themselves, cannot discover Keplers laws and incorporate them into the knowledge base, and further infer Newtons laws from them.

Symbolic AI is powerful at manipulating and modeling abstractions, but deals poorly with massive empirical data streams.

This is why we believe that deep integration of neural and symbolic AI systems is the most viable path to human-level AGI on modern computer hardware.

Its worth noting in this light that many recent deep neural net successes are actually hybrid architectures, e.g. the AlphaGo architecture from Google DeepMind integrates two neural nets with one game tree. Their recent MuZero architecture, which can master both board and Atari games, goes further along this path using deep neural nets together with planning with a learned model.

The highly successful ERNIE architecture for Natural Language Processing question-answering from Tsinghua University integrates knowledge graphs into neural networks. The symbolic sides of these particular architectures are relatively simplistic, but they can be seen as pointing in the direction of more sophisticated neural-symbolic hybrid systems.

The integration of neural and symbolic methods relies heavily on what has been the most profound revolution in AI in the last 20 years the rise of probabilistic methods: e.g. neural generative models, Bayesian inference techniques, estimation of distribution algorithms, probabilistic programming.

As an example of the emerging practical applications of probabilistic neural-symbolic methods, at the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 2019 conference in Shenzhen last August, Hugo Latapie from Cisco Systems described work his team has done in collaboration with our AI team at SingularityNET Foundation, using the OpenCog AGI engine together with deep neural networks to analyze street scenes.

The OpenCog framework provides a neural-symbolic framework that is especially rich on the symbolic side, and interoperates with popular deep neural net frameworks. It features a combination of probabilistic logic networks (PLNs), probabilistic evolutionary program learning (MOSES), and probabilistic generative neural networks.

The traffic analytics system demonstrated by Latapie deploys OpenCog-based symbolic reasoning on top of deep neural models for street scene cameras, enabling feats such as semantic anomaly detection (flagging collisions, jaywalking, and other deviations from expectation), unsupervised scene labeling for new cameras, and single-shot transfer learning (e.g. learning about new signals for bus stops with a single example).

The difference between a pure deep neural net approach and a neural-symbolic approach in this case is stark. With deep neural nets deployed in a straightforward way, each neural network models what is seen by a single camera. Forming a holistic view of whats happening at a given intersection, let alone across a whole city, is much more of a challenge.

In the neural-symbolic architecture, the symbolic layer provides a shared ontology, so all cameras can be connected for to an integrated traffic management system. If an ambulance needs to be routed in a way that will neither encounter nor cause significant traffic, this sort of whole-scenario symbolic understanding is exactly what one needs.

The same architecture can be applied to many other related use cases where one can use neural-symbolic AI to both enrich local intelligence and connect multiple sources/locations into a holistic view for reasoning and action.

It may not be impossible to crack this particular problem using a more complex deep neural net architecture, with multiple neural nets working together in subtle ways. However, this is an example of something that is easier and more straightforward to address using a neural-symbolic approach. And it is quite close to machine vision, one of deep neural nets great strengths.

In other, more abstract application domains such as mathematical theorem-proving or biomedical discovery the critical value of the symbolic side of the neural-symbolic hybrid is even more dramatic.

Deep neural nets have done amazing things over the last few years, bringing applied AI to a whole new level. Were betting that the next phase of incredible AI achievements are going to be delivered via hybrid AI architectures such as neural-symbolic systems. This trend has already started in 2019 in a relatively quiet way and in 2020 we expect it will pick up speed dramatically.

Published January 15, 2020 09:00 UTC

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What are neural-symbolic AI methods and why will they dominate 2020? - The Next Web