Methodology – Page 15 – artdiamondblog.com

Myron Scholes on Sticking to His Ideas, Losing $4 Billion in Four Months, and Rejecting Taleb’s Advice

Myron Scholes. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 22) The writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that instead of giving advice on managing risk, you “should be in a retirement home doing sudoku.”
If someone says to you, “Go to an old-folks’ home,” that’s kind of ridiculous, because a lot of old people are doing terrific things for society. I never tried sudoku. Maybe he spends his time doing sudoku.

Some economists believe that mathematical models like yours lulled banks into a false sense of security, and I am wondering if you have revised your ideas as a consequence.
I haven’t changed my ideas. A bank needs models to measure risk. The problem, however, is that any one bank can measure its risk, but it also has to know what the risk taken by other banks in the system happens to be at any particular moment.
. . .
After leaving academia, you helped found Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that lost $4 billion in four months and became a symbol of ’90s-style financial failure. .
Obviously, you prefer not to have lost money for investors.

For the full interview, see:
DEBORAH SOLOMON. “Questions for Myron Scholes; Crash Course.” The New York Times, Magazine Section (Sun., May 17, 2009): 22.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original versions, to indicate questions by Deborah Solomon.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated May 14, 2009.)

“A Very Clear-Thinking Heretic” Doubted Big Bang Theory

“Geoffrey Burbidge’s work in astronomy changed the field.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. 26) Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84.
. . .
Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang.
Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view.
In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.”
Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said.

For the full obituary, see:

DENNIS OVERBYE. “Geoffrey Burbidge, Who Traced Life to Stardust, Is Dead at 84 ” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., February 7, 2010 ): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary is dated February 6, 2010.)

Documenting Dangers of Growing Public Debt (and of Replacing History with Math)

“Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart at Ms. Reinhart’s Washington home. They started their book around 2003, years before the economy began to crumble.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

Their handiwork is contained in their recent best seller, “This Time Is Different,” a quantitative reconstruction of hundreds of historical episodes in which perfectly smart people made perfectly disastrous decisions. It is a panoramic opus, both geographically and temporally, covering crises from 66 countries over the last 800 years.
The book, and Ms. Reinhart’s and Mr. Rogoff’s own professional journeys as economists, zero in on some of the broader shortcomings of their trade — thrown into harsh relief by economists’ widespread failure to anticipate or address the financial crisis that began in 2007.
“The mainstream of academic research in macroeconomics puts theoretical coherence and elegance first, and investigating the data second,” says Mr. Rogoff. For that reason, he says, much of the profession’s celebrated work “was not terribly useful in either predicting the financial crisis, or in assessing how it would it play out once it happened.”
“People almost pride themselves on not paying attention to current events,” he says.
. . .
(p. 6) Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt.
To bolster their calls for tightened government spending, budget hawks have cited the book’s warnings about the perils of escalating public and private debt. Left-leaning analysts have been quick to take issue with that argument, saying that fiscal austerity perpetuates joblessness, and have been attacking economists associated with it.
. . .
The economics profession generally began turning away from empirical work in the early 1970s. Around that time, economists fell in love with theoretical constructs, a shift that has no single explanation. Some analysts say it may reflect economists’ desire to be seen as scientists who describe and discover universal laws of nature.
“Economists have physics envy,” says Richard Sylla, a financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He argues that Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate whom many credit with endowing economists with a mathematical tool kit, “showed that a lot of physical theories and concepts had economic analogs.”
Since that time, he says, “economists like to think that there is some physical, stable state of the world if they get the model right.” But, he adds, “there is really no such thing as a stable state for the economy.”
Others suggest that incentives for young economists to publish in journals and gain tenure predispose them to pursue technical wizardry over deep empirical research and to choose narrow slices of topics. Historians, on the other hand, are more likely to focus on more comprehensive subjects — that is, the material for books — that reflect a deeply experienced, broadly informed sense of judgment.
“They say historians peak in their 50s, once they’ve accumulated enough knowledge and wisdom to know what to look for,” says Mr. Rogoff. “By contrast, economists seem to peak much earlier. It’s hard to find an important paper written by an economist after 40.”

For the full story, see:
CATHERINE RAMPELL. “They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It).” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., July 4, 2010): 1 & 6.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 2, 2010.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

The reference for the book is:
Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth Rogoff. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Source of book image: http://www.paschaldonohoe.ie/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/This-time-is-different.jpg

Scientific Opinion Shifts to Galambos Who Was Fired for His Theory

“Robert Galambos, . . . , studied the inaudible sounds that allow bats to fly in the dark.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 20) Dr. Robert Galambos, a neuroscientist whose work included helping to prove how bats navigate in total darkness and deciphering the codes by which nerves transmit sounds to the brain, died June 18 at his home in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 96.
. . .
In 1960, while on an airplane, Dr. Galambos wrote that he had an inspiring thought: that the tiny cells that make up 40 percent of the brain, called glia, are as crucial to mental functioning as neurons.
“I know how the brain works!” he exclaimed to his companion.
But his superiors at Walter Reed found the theory so radical that he was soon job-hunting. The view at the time was that glia existed mainly to support neurons, considered the structural and functional unit of the nervous system. But Dr. Galambos clung to his belief, despite the failure of three experiments he performed in the 1960s.
Since then, scientific opinion has been shifting in his direction. In 2008, Ben A. Barres of the Stanford University School of Medicine wrote glowingly in the journal Neuron about the powerful role glia are now seen to play. He concluded, “Quite possibly the most important roles of glia have yet to be imagined.”

For the full obituary, see:
DOUGLAS MARTIN. “Robert Galambos, 96, Dies; Studied Nerves and Sound.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., July 18, 2010): 20.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated July 15, 2010 and has the title “Robert Galambos, Neuroscientist Who Showed How Bats Navigate, Dies at 96.”)
(Note: ellipses added.)

Smithsonian and NIH Are Contributing to Wikipedia, But Will Professors?

(p. B2) Professor Jemielniak in the passage quoted below, asks why professors would ever contribute to Wikipedia since they already can get published in academic journals, and also have a captive audience at their lectures.
Based on that reasoning, Professors likewise would have little motive to blog—yet many do. Why? Perhaps because there is something satisfying in reaching a wide audience of readers who are not required to read, but who choose to read.
(Readers of academic articles are often few, and students at academic lectures are often captives whose bodies are present, but whose minds are somewhere else.)

(p. B2) In the United States, the Wikimedia Foundation has sponsored an academy to teach experts at the National Institutes of Health how to contribute to the site and monitor what appears there. And Mr. Wyatt said that other institutions including the Smithsonian had inquired about getting their own Wikipedian in residence to facilitate their staff members’ contributions to the site.

One talk here by a Polish professor, Dariusz Jemielniak, took a jab at the idea of experts as contributors. He said he had noticed that students often remained contributors to Wikipedia but that professors left quickly. His explanation was that Wikipedia was really just a game for people to gain status. A teenager offering the definitive account of the Thirty Years’ War gets a huge audience and respect from his peers. But, Mr. Jemielniak asked, why would a professor stoop to edit Wikipedia?
“Professors already get published and can lecture and force people to listen to their ideas,” he said.

For the full story, see:

NOAM COHEN. “Link by Link; How Can Wikipedia Grow? Maybe in Bengali.” The New York Times (Mon., July 12, 2010): B2.
(Note: the online version of the article is dates July 11, 2010.)

Jefferson “Was Experimental and Had a Lot of Failures”

“In the vegetable garden at Monticello, his home in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson sowed seeds from around the world and shared them with farmers. He was not afraid of failure, which happened often.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Steven Johnson has written an intriguing argument that the intellectual foundation of the founding fathers was based as much on experimental science as on religion. The article quoted below provides a small bit of additional evidence in support of Johnson’s argument.

(p. D1) NEW gardeners smitten with the experience of growing their own food — amazed at the miracle of harvesting figs on a Brooklyn rooftop, horrified by the flea beetles devouring the eggplants — might be both inspired and comforted by the highs and lows recorded by Thomas Jefferson from the sun-baked terraces of his two-acre kitchen garden 200 years ago.

And they could learn a thing or two from the 19th-century techniques still being used at Monticello today.
“He was experimental and had a lot of failures,” Peter Hatch, the director of gardens and grounds, said on a recent afternoon, as we stood under a scorching sun in the terraced garden that took seven slaves three years to cut into the hill. “But Jefferson always believed that ‘the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.’ ”
After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.
As we walked along the geometric beds — many of them planted in an ancient Roman quincunx pattern — I made notes on the beautiful crops I had never grown. Sea kale, with its great, ruffled blue-green leaves, now full of little round seed pods. Egyptian onions, whose tall green stalks bore quirky hats of tiny seeds and wavy green sprouts. A pre-Columbian tomato called Purple Calabash, whose energetic vines would soon be trained up a cedar trellis made of posts cut from the woods.
“Purple Calabash is one of my favorites,” Mr. Hatch said. “It’s an acidic, al-(p. D7)most black tomato, with a convoluted, heavily lobed shape.”
Mr. Hatch, who has directed the restoration of the gardens here since 1979, has pored over Jefferson’s garden notes and correspondence. He has distilled that knowledge in “Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden,” to be published by Yale University Press.

For the full story, see:
ANNE RAVER. “A Revolutionary With Seeds, Too.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 1, 2010): D1 & D7.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated June 30, 2010 and has the title “In the Garden; At Monticello, Jefferson’s Methods Endure.”)

The British Museum Collaborating with Wikipedia

“Two visitors from Wikipedia, Liam Wyatt, left, and Joseph Seddon, at the British Museum.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) The British Museum has begun an unusual collaboration with Wikipedia, the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages.

About 40 Wikipedia contributors in the London area spent Friday with a “backstage pass” to the museum, meeting with curators and taking photographs of the collection. And in a curious reversal in status, curators were invited to review Wikipedia’s treatment of the museum’s collection and make a case that important pieces were missing or given short shrift.
Among those wandering the galleries was the museum’s first Wikipedian in residence, Liam Wyatt, who will spend five weeks in the museum’s offices to build a relationship between the two organizations, one founded in 1753, the other in 2001.
“I looked at how many Rosetta Stone page views there were at Wikipedia,” said Matthew Cock, who is in charge of the museum’s Web site and is supervising the collaboration with Wikipedia. “That is perhaps our iconic object, and five times as many people go to the Wikipedia article as to ours.”
In other words, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Once criticized as amateurism run amok, Wikipedia has become ingrained in the online world: it is consulted by millions of users when there is breaking news; its articles are frequently the first result when a search engine is used.
. . .
(p. C6) Getting permission to work with Wikipedia was not as hard a sell as he expected, Mr. Cock said. “Everyone assumed everyone else hated it and that I shouldn’t recommend it to the directorate,” he said. “I laid it out, put a paper together. I won’t say I was surprised, but I was very pleased it was very well received.”
He said he had enthusiastic support from four departments, including Greek and Roman antiquity and prints and drawings. “I don’t think it is just the young curators,” he added.

For the full story, see:
NOAM COHEN. “Venerable British Museum Enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution.” The New York Times (Sat., June 5, 2010): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated June 4, 2010.)

Economics Is More Like Biology than Physics

(p. A13) If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system. That’s hard enough. But they can’t tell you what will happen with any precision to the population of a particular species of frog if rainfall goes up this year in a particular rain forest. They might not even be able to count the number of frogs right now with any exactness.

We have the same problems in economics. The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions.
The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one’s thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don’t know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability.

For the full commentary, see:

RUSS ROBERTS. “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science? Some macroeconomists say if we just study the numbers long enough we’ll be able to design better policy. That’s like the sign in the bar: Free Beer Tomorrow.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., FEBRUARY 26, 2010): A13.

“The Intellectual Energy is No Longer with the Economists Who Construct Abstract and Elaborate Models”

(p. A23) In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.
In a column called “A Crisis of Understanding,” Robert J. Shiller of Yale pointed out that the best explanation of the crisis isn’t even a work of economic analysis. It’s a history book — “This Time is Different” by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff — that is almost entirely devoid of theory.
One gets the sense, at least from the outside, that the intellectual energy is no longer with the economists who construct abstract and elaborate models. Instead, the field seems to be moving in a humanist direction. Many economists are now trying to absorb lessons learned by psychologists, neuroscientists and sociologists.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BROOKS. “The Return of History.” The New York Times (Fri., March 26, 2010): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was dated March 25, 2010.”)

PowerPoint Useful for Graphs and for “Hypnotizing Chickens”

“A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.” Source of caption and graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
. . .
(p. A8) Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
. . .
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

For the full story, see:
COREY ELISABETH BUMILLER. “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 27, 2010): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 26, 2010.)

An interesting, but overdone critique of PowerPoint by an intelligent expert on graphics is:
Tufte, Edward R. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2003.