Archive
A.F.R. Transparency Panel coming up on Friday in D.C.
I’m preparing for a short trip to D.C. this week to take part in a day-long event held by Americans for Financial Reform. You can get the announcement here online, but I’m not sure what the finalized schedule of the day is going to be. Also, I believe it will be recorded, but I don’t know the details yet.
In any case, I’m psyched to be joining this, and the AFR are great guys doing important work in the realm of financial reform.
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Opening Wall Street’s Black Box: Pathways to Improved Financial Transparency
Sponsored By Americans for Financial Reform and Georgetown University Law Center
Keynote Speaker: Gary Gensler Chair, Commodity Futures Trading Commission
October 11, 2013 10 AM – 3 PM
Georgetown Law Center, Gewirz Student Center, 12th Floor
120 F Street NW, Washington, DC (Judiciary Square Metro) (Space is limited. Please RSVP to AFRtransparencyrsvp@gmail.com)
The 2008 financial crisis revealed that regulators and many sophisticated market participants were in the dark about major risks and exposures in our financial system. The lack of financial transparency enabled large-scale fraud and deception of investors, weakened the stability of the financial system, and contributed to the market failure after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Five years later, despite regulatory efforts, it’s not clear how much the situation has improved.
Join regulators, market participants, and academic experts for an exploration of the progress made – and the work that remains to be done – toward meaningful transparency on Wall Street. How can better information and disclosure make the financial system both fairer and safer?
Panelists include:
| Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times and Pro Publica |
| Zach Gast, Head of financial sector research, Center on Financial Research and Analysis |
| Amias Gerety, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the FSOC, United States Treasury |
| Henry Hu, Alan Shivers Chair in the Law of Banking and Finance, University of Texas Law School |
| Albert “Pete” Kyle, Charles E. Smith Professor of Finance, University of Maryland |
| Adam Levitan, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center |
| Antoine Martin, Vice President, New York Federal Reserve Bank |
| Brad Miller, Former Representative from North Carolina; Of Counsel, Grais & Ellsworth |
| Cathy O’Neil, Senior Data Scientist, Johnson Research Labs; Occupy Alternative Banking |
| Gene Phillips, Director, PF2 Securities Evaluation |
| Greg Smith, Author of “Why I Left Goldman Sachs”; former Goldman Sachs Executive Director |
Sir Andrew Wiles smacks down unethical use of mathematics for profit
My buddy Jordan Ellenberg sent me this link to an article which covered Sir Andrew Wiles’ comments at a the opening of the Andrew Wiles Building, a housing complex for math nerds in Oxford. From the article:
Wiles claimed that the abuse of mathematics during the global financial meltdown in 2009, particularly by banks’ manipulation of complex derivatives, had tarnished his chosen subject’s reputation.
He explained that scientists used to worry about the ethical repercussions of their work and that mathematics research, which used to be removed from day-to-day life, has diverged “towards goals that you might not believe in”.
At one point Wiles said the following, which is music to my ears coming from a powerful mathematician:
One has to be aware now that mathematics can be misused and that we have to protect its good name.
Two things.
First, maybe I should invite Wiles to be on my panel of mathematicians for investigating public math models. I originally thought this should be run under the auspices of a society such as the AMS but after talking to some people I’ve given up on that and just want it to be independent.
Second, the Andrew Wiles building was evidently paid for primarily by Landon Clay, who also founded the Clay Institute and was the CEO of Eaton Vance, which an investment management firm which provides its clients with wealth management tools and advice. I’m wondering if that kind of mathematical tool was in Wiles’ mind when he made his speech, and if so, how it went over. Certainly in my experience, wealth management tools are definitely in the “weapons of math destruction” toolbox.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Sorry for the lateness of this column. Aunt Pythia slept in this morning and then went for a beautiful bike ride in Central Park. It’s perfect biking weather: somewhat chilly and cloudy, so the sun doesn’t get in your eyes and you don’t get overheated. You guys gotta try it!
However, Aunt Pythia didn’t forget you guys and she wants you to enjoy today’s column and of course she urges you as always to:
ask a question at the bottom of the page!!
By the way, if you want more, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Why is it that in this country we can accept that a lobbyist is a valid job description and a valid job but we can’t accept a sex worker?
The profession is legal in Europe, why not the US?
Short and Sweet
Deat S&S,
I wasn’t sure whether, after that first sentence, you wanted lobbyists banned or sex workers made legal. To tell you the truth I coulda gone either way.
So yes, I agree, it’s interesting to think about A) what the hold-up is on legalizing sex work and B) what the pros and cons are of sex-work being legal.
As for the politics, after writing this post about the GOP mindset I’m really not surprised that we haven’t gotten consensus.
As for the pros and cons, I’ve thought about this before, and since I don’t have the actual data I am going on these assumptions I’ve gathered from various reading on the topic, which would all have to be verified:
- Protecting sex workers makes the profession safer for the workers. It means, for example, that they can call the cops if the clients misbehave, not to mention demand things like health insurance and regular HIV tests like porn industry actors.
- It also has economic effects. For example, legalized sex workers probably makes buying sex cheaper (and safer), as well as not-quite-sex stuff like topless bars and lap dances.
- So, in particular, there are plenty of current U.S. establishments that would lose money if sex-working became legalized, specifically places that have super expensive legal almost-sex things and possibly even more expensive illegal sex things for sale. Of course if they moved quickly they could capture the new market.
- Also, keep in mind that, although safer when legal, sex-work is still dangerous. And if it were more widespread it would affect more people, meaning it might be a net negative thing to do. Kind of like how alcohol is more harmful than heroin because it’s so widely used.
Going back to the original question, how about we just outlaw lobbyists?
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
We know you live in New York. But what are your favorite cities or places that you’ve visited?
Curious
Dear Curious,
There are two kinds of traveling for me: with my kids and alone or with other grownups. When I travel with my kids, I basically just spend time with them. But when I travel alone or with other grown-ups, I do it to meet the people living in that place. I am not visiting to see historical things or to view what that culture’s elite considers its finest works.
I don’t like museums or monuments or historical sites, I never have. I like talking to the people currently living somewhere, and I like exploring how they actually live day to day. I’d rather see their markets than their art. Partly this is because I don’t get art but mostly it’s because I think it’s fascinating to see the differences in average people’s lives and how that informs their mindset. I walk around for hours in their cities and intentionally fall into random conversations at the shop or at lunch or at coffee or at a live music performance. That’s a perfect day for me.
Since everyone shops, and everyone eats, and most everyone talks to people when they do this, I’m pretty neutral to exactly where I go. I always find something fascinating about any place I visit, be it Vermont or Prague.
The only place I’ve ever gone where I found the surroundings more interesting than the people is on my honeymoon, when we went to Alaska, and I got really into geology. And the most fascinating and engaging people I ever met were in Accra, Ghana.
One last thing: I love traveling and I would do way more of it if I didn’t have 3 kids. In fact that’s one thing I am truly jealous of for people with no kids, that they get to travel so much. Enjoy that!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m from Europe. There are some fairly strong cultural differences between countries, but also some common trends. One is anti-US bashing (e.g. NSA stuff, Iraq fiasco, guns and abortion laws…). To the point that I know some academics who actually refuse to travel to the US.
And yet, I’ve been there a couple times and am well aware that there’s a sizable liberal community, especially on the coasts, and some places like the Boston area or the Silicon Valley seem quite attractive to me.
So to my question: what advice would you give to a hesitant European (who has no family issues yet, but not a large wallet either)? Land an IT job, and then fly there and just give it a try? Or maybe you have observed many Europeans going back after a couple years?
Patriotism Is Dangerous
Dear PID,
Important question: are people objecting to living in a country with those kinds of policies? Or are they objecting to living in a country where everyone wants to personally own a loaded pistol so they can kill anyone trying to have an abortion?
Here’s the thing. There’s the policies, and then there are the people. While it’s reasonable to avoid living in the U.S. because of it’s insane policies, especially as a non-citizen, it’s of course not reasonable to assume that every city is filled with people who are insane.
For that matter a friend of mine, who is not a descendant of Europeans, tells me that Europeans are hugely racist – not everyone, and not everywhere, but it makes him not want to travel to Europe. So we see the flip side of the coin, namely you can also have reason avoid a country that has reasonable policies but unappealing people.
I’m not really answering your question, but I do want to challenge you (and your European academic brethren) to think about it more carefully. In New York or San Francisco you won’t find a lot of people supporting the policies you despise, but then again you will be in some sense a part of that system even so.
As for what you should do: I know LOTS of Europeans who come here and love it, and still hate lots of the policy. My husband, for example. Of course I am less likely to meet people who leave. So do with that what you will.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I have a problem with this guy I was platonically interested in, because he seemed interesting conversation. Unfortunately, he turned out to be quite a self-centered person, so while having intelligent thoughts, his overflowing self confidence makes it less fun to be around.
Worse, he is sexually interested in me, despite my very clear messages that this is never going to happen. He claims freedom of speech of some sort and openness between friends. For a while he used opportunities when we meet at various social circles to kiss me and try to touch me, and once even made some loud embarrassing comments in the presence of a crowd.
I thought I had this under control, as we are both in stable, long term relationships, and I could handle this shit. Indeed he stopped for a while, but recently started texting me again. I don’t want to make a big scene, because innocent people may get hurt, so I try to be civil when we chance to meet, but I do wonder whether there is a particular angle at which I can kick him in the balls to get the message across.
Half Of The Time Intolerably Embarrassed
Dear HOTTIE,
Ooooh I like your sign-off.
OK so just to be SUPER CLEAR about this: have you told him in no uncertain terms to stop? Have you said “I want you to stop trying to be sexual with me, right now”? Have you texted him back with the words “please do not text me”? I will assume you have since it is CLEARLY not enough to think he will get the hint just because you guys are both in stable long-term relationships.
In other words, when you say you’ve given him “very clear messages” I need to believe that you mean “I said no”. Many many men do not hear “no” until you actually say that word, so please promise me you haven’t expected him to pick it up through certain looks or the way you don’t respond to a stolen kiss.
Okay, now that that is out of the way, I am surprised you are willing to talk to him at all. Are you still friends with him? Do you want to be? It sounds like you are somewhat ambivalent, which I think may be the problem here. He might be reading your continued interest in being his friend as sexual interest, or at least as a lack of sexual rejection.
My advice: next time he texts, ignore him altogether, and go ahead and block him now if that is hard to do. Next time you see him in person, if he tries something, take away his hand and say you’re not interested, and that you’re planning to talk to his long-term partner about how he can’t seem to stop trying something even though you’ve rejected him multiple times, and you’re going to ask his partner for advice on how to get him to stop. If he laughs or otherwise ignores you tell him you’re serious and might follow it up with a restraining order.
In other words, make it clear to him that it’s really not OK, the way he’s been acting, and that you are willing to risk real discomfort in relationships (especially his) to get this resolved. It has nothing to do with your relationship, so don’t feel threatened if he says he’ll talk to your long-term partner.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Inside the GOP, a report from Democracy Corps
I was wondering what a lot of other people were wondering yesterday. Namely why, if Republicans were claiming their party was being hijacked by a small minority of Tea Party lunatics, did they actually have a majority vote for closing down the government? It’s a statistical conundrum.
A fascinating report entitled Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans explains that to me. It was put out by Democracy Corps, a non-profit Democratic strategy think tank co-founded by Stan Greenberg, and it explains the current mindset of different factions of the Republican Party, inferred from focus groups made up of three types of Republicans: Evangelicals (55%), moderates (25%), and Tea Partiers (20%).
You should read the whole thing, because it’s absolutely fascinating, but I think the explanation of the above-mentioned statistical conundrum is as follows: Tea Partiers are minority, but the largest group, namely the Evangelicals (think Fox News, anti-gay marriage) are behind the Tea Party’s agenda on the Affordable Care Act as well as Obamacare, and together they represent the majority of the Republican Party. Maybe you knew this but I didn’t.
Other things this report brings up:
- how deeply race matters to Evangelicals, especially when it comes to Obamacare,
- how tenuous the alliance is between Tea Party Republicans and Evangelicals, considering Tea Partiers don’t care about social issues like gay marriage and Evangelicals deeply care, and
- just how much Fox News matters in this world.
I think I understand the revolving door problem
I was reading this Bloomberg article about the internal risk models at JP Morgan versus Goldman Sachs, and it hit me: I too had an urge for the SEC to hire the insiders at Goldman Sachs to help them “understand risk” at every level. Why not hire a small team of Goldman Sachs experts to help the SEC combat bullshit like what happened with the London Whale?
After all, Goldman people know risk. They probably knew risk even better before 1999, when they went IPO and the partners stopped being personally liable for losses. But even now, of all the big players on the street, Goldman is known for being a few steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to a losing trade.
So it’s natural to want someone from deeply within that culture to come spread their technical risk wisdom to the other side, the regulators.
Unfortunately that’s never what actually happens. Instead of getting the technical knowledge of how to think about risk, how to model a portfolio to squirrel out black holes of mystery, the revolving door instead keeps outputting crazy freaks like Jon Corzine, who blow up firms through, ironically, taking ridiculous risks at the first opportunity.
So, why does this happen? Some possibilities:
- Goldman Sachs promotes crazy freaks because they make great leaders while constrained inside a disciplined culture of calculated risks, but when they get outside they go nuts. This is kind of the model of Mormon children who are finally allowed out into the world and engage in tons of sex and drugs.
- On the flip side, perhaps Goldman Sachs keeps the people who actually understand the technical part of risk very deep in the machine and these guys never get leave the building at all.
- Or maybe, people who understand risk sometimes do go through the revolving door, but they don’t share their knowledge with the other side, because their incentives have changed once they’re outside.
- In other words, they don’t help the regulators understand how banks lie and cheat to regulators, because they’re too busy watering down regulation so their buddies can continuously lie and cheat to regulators.
Whatever the case, for whatever reason we keep using the revolving door in hopes that someone will eventually tell us the magic that Goldman Sachs knows, but we never quite get anyone like that, and that means the the SEC and other regulators are woefully unprepared for the kind of tricks that banks have up their sleeves.
“The only thing we really learned from the S&L scandal was how CEO’s should lawyer up”
The title of today’s piece is a quote from economist Chris Thornberg in a Reuters interview I found a couple of days ago.
It’s almost 15 minutes long, and the first couple of minutes are concerned with the housing market, which he has strong opinions on and I don’t, but then he moves on to financial regulation, the question of accountability, municipal bankruptcies, and whether economists suck at their jobs, subjects I care about a lot.
It’s a super interesting interview, and I’m planning to mail Thornberg a copy of Occupy Finance soon. Even though he serves on the advisory board of hedge fund Paulson & Co, he agrees with lots of people who come to Alternative Banking on many issues.
A few examples of what he’s talking about for those of you without 15 minutes to spend on him.
Regulation
He talks about how Dodd-Frank is collapsing in on itself through extensive watering-down and lobbying, and how negotiations over how much “skin in the game” is required around securitization is the death knell of that process.
He talks about how the overall system is under-regulated and not being made accountable. He claims that, instead of trying to draw lines in the sand, we should try to attack the skewed incentives. A lot of people got very rich doing very bad things, he says, and the continued existence of those messed-up incentives will encourage a whole new generation to do the same.
For example, bonuses shouldn’t be given on how many loans you push out into the market but how they perform. We should be able to clawback money, which is to say pull back money from someone who’s done something bad. After all, he points out, Dick Fuld and Angelo Mozilo as men who became filthy rich from doing bad things and are now “untouchable”.
Washington
He also points out that D.C. never went through a recession because of money coming in through lobbying. His top two priorities to improve our system would be:
- To simplify the tax code, both corporate and personal. There too many special interests. Get rid of complexity and make it more progressive.
- Political reform. We like to say the Chinese are “one-party state”. But are we really two-party? We have very little “choice” especially if you take into account the gerrymandering. California is doing a good job reforming here.
Municipal Bankruptcies
Next, he moves onto municipal emergencies in Detroit, Stockton, and San Bernadino. All three city bankruptcies pose the fundamental decisions: what is the sanctity of public pensions? State laws generally insist that pensions be paid.
The issue here is, says Thornberg, that federal bankruptcy laws trump, not state law. So the relevant federal judge can say “too bad” to the contract, and the pensioners will be forced to take a cut like all the other debtholders.
Lawyers in the know think pensions are gonna go, and that precedent for this kind of thing is being established in these three cities in the very near future.
Economics
The Reuters interviewer addressed the issue that, generally speaking, economists missed the oncoming crisis. Does that mean there’s something wrong with economics?
Thornberg: “Professors don’t get published writing papers about the current economy – nobody cares about that.”
He claims that, yes, economists should be more on top of day-to-day stuff, but he claims that the critique misses the broader point, which is that everyone needs to be a better economist. He claims it is a social science which tries to address why people do what they do. And although economists would like to think of it as a mathematical science, they’re wrong to do so.
His advice: don’t listen to economists on TV. Educate yourself and know your source. It’s amazing how much stock we put into economists working for, say, the National Association of Realtors who get paid to say good things like, “it’s a good time to buy and sell a house!”
New Essay, On Being a Data Skeptic, now out
It is available here and is based on a related essay written by Susan Webber entitled “Management’s Great Addiction: It’s time we recognized that we just can’t measure everything.” It is being published by O’Reilly as an e-book.
No, I don’t know who that woman is looking skeptical on the cover. I wish they’d asked me for a picture of a skeptical person, I think my 11-year-old son would’ve done a better job.
“Here and Now” is shilling for the College Board
Did you think public radio doesn’t have advertising? Think again.
Last week Here and Now’s host Jeremy Hobson set up College Board’s James Montoya for a perfect advertisement regarding a story on SAT scores going down. The transcript and recording are here (hat tip Becky Jaffe).
To set it up, they talk about how GPA’s are going up on average over the country but how, at the same time, the average SAT score went down last year.
Somehow the interpretation of this is that there’s grade inflation and that kids must be in need of more test prep because they’re dumber.
What is the College Board?
You might think, especially if you listen to this interview, that the college board is a thoughtful non-profit dedicated to getting kids prepared for college.
Make no mistake about it: the College Board is a big business, and much of their money comes from selling test prep stuff on top of administering tests. Here are a couple of things you might want to know about College Board through its wikipedia page:
Consumer rights organization Americans for Educational Testing Reform (AETR) has criticized College Board for violating its non-profit status through excessive profits and exorbitant executive compensation; nineteen of its executives make more than $300,000 per year, with CEO Gaston Caperton earning $1.3 million in 2009 (including deferred compensation).[10][11] AETR also claims that College Board is acting unethically by selling test preparation materials, directly lobbying legislators and government officials, and refusing to acknowledge test-taker rights.[12]
Anyhoo, let’s just say it this way: College Board has the ability to create an “emergency” about SAT scores, by say changing the test or making it harder, and then the only “reasonable response” is to pay for yet more test prep. And somehow Here and Now’s host Jeremy Hobson didn’t see this coming at all.
The interview
Here’s an excerpt:
HOBSON: It also suggests, when you look at the year-over-year scores, the averages, that things are getting worse, not better, because if I look at, for example, in critical reading in 2006, the average being 503, and now it’s 496. Same deal in math and writing. They’ve gone down.
MONTOYA: Well, at the same time that we have seen the scores go down, what’s very interesting is that we have seen the average GPAs reported going up. So, for example, when we look at SAT test takers this year, 48 percent reported having a GPA in the A range compared to 45 percent last year, compared to 44 percent in 2011, I think, suggesting that there simply have to be more rigor in core courses.
HOBSON: Well, and maybe that there’s grade inflation going on.
MONTOYA: Well, clearly, that there is grade inflation. There is no question about that. And it’s one of the reasons why standardized test scores are so important in the admission office. I know that, as a former dean of admission, test scores help gauge the meaning of a GPA, particularly given the fact that nearly half of all SAT takers are reporting a GPA in the A range.
Just to be super clear about the shilling, here’s Hobson a bit later in the interview:
HOBSON: Well – and we should say that your report noted – since you mentioned practice – that as is the case with the ACT, the students who take the rigorous prep courses do better on the SAT.
What does it really mean when SAT scores go down?
Here’s the thing. SAT scores are fucked with ALL THE TIME. Traditionally, they had to make SAT’s harder since people were getting better at them. As test-makers, they want a good bell curve, so they need to adjust the test as the population changes and as their habits of test prep change.
The result is that SAT tests are different every year, so just saying that the scores went down from year to year is meaningless. Even if the same group of kids took those two different tests in the same year, they’d have different scores.
Also, according to my friend Becky who works with kids preparing for the SAT, they really did make substantial changes recently in the math section, changing the function notation, which makes it much harder for kids to parse the questions. In other words, they switched something around to give kids reason to pay for more test prep.
Important: this has nothing to do with their knowledge, it has to do with their training for this specific test.
If you want to understand the issues outside of math, take for example the essay. According to this critique, the number one criterion for essay grade is length. Length trumps clarity of expression, relevance of the supporting arguments to the thesis, mechanics, and all other elements of quality writing. As my friend Becky says:
I have coached high school students on the SAT for years and have found time and again, much to my chagrin, that students receive top scores for long essays even if they are desultory, tangent-filled and riddled with sentence fragments, run-ons, and spelling errors.
Similarly, I have consistently seen students receive low scores for shorter essays that are thoughtful and sophisticated, logical and coherent, stylish and articulate.
As long as the number one criterion for receiving a high score on the SAT essay is length, students will be confused as to what constitutes successful college writing and scoring well on the written portion of the exam will remain essentially meaningless. High-scoring students will have to unlearn the strategies that led to success on the SAT essay and relearn the fundamentals of written expression in a college writing class.
If the College Board (the makers of the SAT) is so concerned about the dumbing down of American children, they should examine their own role in lowering and distorting the standards for written expression.
Conclusion
Two things. First, shame on College Board and James Montoya for acting like SAT scores are somehow beacons of truth without acknowledging the fiddling that goes on time and time again by his company. And second, shame on Here and Now and Jemery Hobson for being utterly naive and buying in entirely to this scare tactic.
Sunday morning reading
I wanted to share with you guys a few things I’ve been interested in this weekend.
First, this TED talk which for whatever reason never made it onto the TED main website. It’s by Nick Hanauer, and in it he dispels some common economic myths, much like Chapter 7 of Occupy Finance. A juicy quote: “So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
Next, it turns out women are way better than men at orgasms, at least those where you do it all in your head – a “think off”. A full 2% of women can fantasize their way to climax (compared to, I guess, way fewer men) and there’s even training for this skill. Two questions from the mathbabe. First, do wet dreams count? Because if they do I think we’ll have to recount. Second, say I invest my time in this, and get really good at it, since it’s all hands-free and such and will make my life that much more efficient. Is this something that takes a lot of time? Can I do it whilst carrying groceries home, or whilst cooking dinner? On the subway? Between stops? Details please.
Next, here’s an important discussion of why junior people get criminally prosecuted – in this case, for the debacle that was the JP Morgan London Whale case – while the big bosses just get vaguely complained about in a civil case, and the shareholders end up paying huge fines for their misbehavior. Last two lines: “Yet it remains disquieting when the same actions result in criminal charges for some but only a civil case for others, and no individuals are held responsible for misconduct at a company. In the end, we are left to trust that prosecutors have made good decisions.” There’s no recourse for bad prosecuting either. How do we even protest bad prosecuting?
Next, I’ve been listening to some seriously catchy and funny tunes my boys turned me on to. What makes me old is how long it takes me to catch on to stuff, since I heard this one years ago, but it seems that everything that these guys touch is hilarious. Especially this one (also see “I Just Had Sex” and “Jack Sparrow“):
Finally, I’m really into knitting recently, and I recently figured out how to knit this pattern even though you’d have to pay big bucks to get the official pattern. Email me if you’re interested in the bootleg version.
Not mine – I stole this picture. I am still working on mine.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Thanks guys, Aunt Pythia has been feeling some love this week, ever since I threatened to murder her. Nothing like a damsel in distress to get the ethical-dilemma juices flowing. Please keep the questions coming though, we don’t want her continually scared and exhausted, that’s no way to live.
In other words, enjoy today’s advice, but please:
Don’t forget to ask a question at the bottom!!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
My partner needs to find a new job. I believe she needs to (at least partially) reinvent herself, although she’s not very adventurous.
You’ve reinvented yourself a few times, you probably know a great deal about what works in this process. I remember you once posted about creating a spreadsheet and recording what you like, what you don’t etc until you found your dream job.
I’m looking for this type of exercises that would challenge her to find a job she loves as opposed to the job she can easily land. Any other insights from your remodeling thought process? Any other resources/reference you would recommend?
Abelian Grape
Dear Abelian,
I don’t believe much in astrology, but I can dig the next closest thing, which is personality tests. I recently looked in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and discovered that I’m a so-called “ENTP”, which is to say extroverted (duh), intuitive, thinking, and perceptive. Who knows why, a test told me[1]. That means I’m:
Quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert, and outspoken. Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems. Adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analyzing them strategically. Good at reading other people. Bored by routine, will seldom do the same thing the same way, apt to turn to one new interest after another.
Why do I mention this? First of all because everyone loves talking about personality tests – trust me – and second of all because it’s in my nature to reinvent myself. I don’t do it because I’m theoretically excited by reinvention, but because I’m bored and compelled to start something new.
So, two conclusions. First, your partner might just not be like that. Second, she might be like that in special circumstances, but in that case she’d need to get to the point of frustration and boredom that she’s the one writing to Aunt Pythia for advice on self-reinvention rather than you. Once that happens I will indeed point her to my tools of reinvention.
My advice is to be supportive of her but not to push her into “reinvention” if that’s not how she rolls. It just won’t work and it will feel to her like another thing she’s failing at. Wait for her, and if you’re not the kind of person that is patient, then that’s a problem in itself and I’ll expect to hear back from you, although given how impatient I am, the advice won’t be hopeful.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
1. Actually, one test told me that, then another one said “ENFJ”, but “ENTP” helps me make my point better.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I hope you’re feeling better.
This is, I admit, a rather lame question, as I am sure I could’ve answered it myself when I was a student. But now I’m old and hence stupid.
I’ll phrase it as a “sock drawer” question. Suppose my drawer contained 44 black socks and 116 white ones, and I draw them out blindly in pairs. What are the chances of getting exactly 10 black pairs?
More generally, if I have b black and w white socks, what is the probability of getting exactly p pairs of black ones?
Thanks Pythia-babe!
Socks Maniac
Dear Socks,
Are the socks already rolled into pairs? Not clear from your question, but I’ll assume so. Otherwise the question is harder, so please do re-submit if I got it wrong. Also, are you blindly taking out exactly 10 pairs and looking to see if they’re all black? I’ll assume that too since you didn’t specify.
Assuming the above, we’re starting with 22 black pairs and 58 white pairs in a drawer, and we take out 10 pairs, and we’re wondering what the chances are that they’re all black. We just need to count the total ways they could be all black and then divide by the total ways we could have done the extraction.
Start with the “all black” count: there are 22 ways we could choose the first black pair, then 21 ways to choose the second black pair, etc., so we get 22*21* … *13 ways altogether to get 10 black pairs.
Next, count the “anything goes” possibilities: we have 22+58=80 pairs of socks altogether, which means we have 80 ways to choose the first pair, then 79 ways to choose the second pair, etc., giving us 80*79*78*…*71 ways to get all ten pairs. Some of them will be all black, but not many.
In fact if you take that ratio – google “22*21*20*19*18*17*16*15*14*13/(80*79*78*77*76*75*74*73*72*71)” – you will see that the answer is very small indeed: 4e-7. You know it’s small if you need scientific notation.
Auntie P
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’ve spent the last year and a half working as, effectively, project manager to get a fairly cool academic mobile app out the door. We’ve applied for a grant to renew the project, but if the grant fails, I’ll be asked to leave $reallyNiceCountry again.
How do I manage the sense of powerlessness that stems from being a 30-year-old freshly minted Ph.D. either about to be deported again or offered a job that allows me a sufficient contract window to become a permanent resident?
A sense of loyalty (and major deadlines) mean that I don’t feel right trying to apply for other jobs in case the grant is passed.
Exhausted Academic
Dear Exhausted,
I’m glad you wrote. I really object to your sense of loyalty, and I see this all too often among freshly minted foreign-born Ph.D.’s.
Face it, you are a specialist in a bizarre system (the intersection of the academic system and the U.S. visa system) with ridiculously arbitrary and last-minute changes of plan. There is absolutely no reason for you not to develop other plans while you are waiting around for the grant to come through or not. In fact you’re a fool for not applying for other jobs, straight up. Deadlines are a short-term distraction from making your life in a country where you want to live. Your life plan is your priority, not someone else’s app deadline.
Here’s my advice, to you and to anyone else in a related situation. No wonder you’re feeling helpless, it’s because you’re acting passively and helplessly. Nobody is going to think strategically about your future except you. Never let this happen again, and get thee on the job market immediately. People with your education level and mad skillz will get great jobs if they go and look. But you gotta go and look. And if you need to learn other stuff to get a good job, then go learn that stuff. But don’t act like the stupid NSF is the voice of God.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Why is it that the students for whom you’ve made the most opportunity, and invested the most in, are the ones that ultimately screw you?
Pissed Off Professor
Dear POP,
Without more details, I’m going to have to use my imagination here.
I can understand what you might mean by making opportunities for your students – you help them with their work, you write them letters, you make calls and introductions on their behalf to help them land jobs. Granted, it can be a lot of work and you are staking your reputation on their work ethic and smarts. On the other hand, it is your job, and you get paid for it, and your reputation also grows with theirs.
But I’m getting a bit lost with the them-screwing-you part. If they simply aren’t very good at the jobs you help them get, then I don’t think that can be considered screwing you. It’s hard for me to imagine exactly what that could mean beyond that. Is the student spreading nasty rumors about your work? Are there internal politics in your field and your student isn’t in your camp? Has the student stolen your ideas?
Or is it something totally normal, like the student doesn’t express sufficient gratitude for your help? In this case I’d say, welcome to young people. Being an advisor is a lot like being a parent, and in this society we don’t get lots of gratitude as parents. Move to China if you want that stuff.
Or maybe I missed it altogether, which is why you’d need to say more when you write back.
Aunt Pytha
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Sometimes, The World Is Telling You To Polish Up Your LinkedIn Profile
The above title was stolen verbatim from an excellent essay by Dan Milstein on the Hut 8 Labs blog (hat tip Deane Yang). The actual title of the essay is “No Deadlines For You! Software Dev Without Estimates, Specs or Other Lies”
He wrote the essay about how, as an engineer, you can both make yourself invaluable to your company and avoid meaningless and arbitrary deadlines on your projects. So, he’s an engineer, but the advice he gives is surprisingly close to the advice I was trying to give on Monday night when I spoke at the Columbia Data Science Society (my slides are here, by the way). More on that below.
Milstein is an engaging writer. He wrote a book called Coding, Fast and Slow, which I now feel like reading just because I enjoy his insights and style. Here’s a small excerpt:
Let’s say you’ve started at a new job, leading a small team of engineers. On your first day, an Important Person comes by your desk. After some welcome-to-the-business chit chat, he/she hands you a spec. You look it over—it describes a new report to add to the company’s product. Of course, like all specs, it’s pretty vague, and, worse, it uses some jargon you’ve heard around the office, but haven’t quite figured out yet.
You look up from the spec to discover that the Important Person is staring at you expectantly: “So, <Your Name>, do you think you and your team can get that done in 3 months?”
What do you do?
Here are some possible approaches (all of which I’ve tried… and none of which has ever worked out well):
- Immediately try to flesh out the spec in more detail
“How are we summing up this number? Is this piece of data required? What does <jargon word> mean, here, exactly?”
- Stall, and take the spec to your new team
“Hmm. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmm. Do you think, um, Bob (that’s his name, right?) has the best handle on these kinds of things?”
- Give the spec a quick skim, and then listen to the seductive voice of System I
“Sure, yeah, 3 months sounds reasonable” (OMG, I wish this wasn’t something I’ve doneSO MANY TIMES).
- Push back aggressively
“I read this incredibly convincing blog post 1 about how it’s impossible to commit to deadlines for software projects, sorry, I just can’t do that.”
He then goes on to write that very blog post. In it, he explains what you should do, which is to learn why the project has been planned in the first place, and what the actual business question is, so you have full context for your job and you know what it means to the company for this to succeed or fail.
The way I say this, regularly, to aspiring data scientists I run into, is that you are often given a data science question that’s been filtered from a business question, through a secondary person who has some idea that they’ve molded that business question into a “mathematical question,” and they want you to do the work of answering that question, under some time constraint and resource constraints that they’ve also picked out of the air.
But often that process has perverted the original aims – often because proxies have magically appeared in the place of the original objects of interest – and it behooves a data scientist who doesn’t want to be working on the wrong problem to go to the original source and verify that their work is answering a vital business question, that they’re optimizing for the right thing, and that they understand the actual constraints (like deadlines but also resources) rather than the artificial constraints made up by whoever is in charge of telling the nerds what to do.
In other words, I suggest that each data scientist “becomes part business person,” and talks to the business owner of the given problem directly until they’re sure they know what needs to get done with data.
Milstein has a bunch of great tips on how to go through with this process, including:
- Counting on people’s enjoyment of hearing their own ideas repeated and fears understood,
- Using a specific template when talking to Important People, namely a) “I’m going to echo that back, make sure I understand”, b) echo it back, c) “Do I have that right?”.
- To always think and discuss your work in terms of risks and information for the business. Things like, you need this information to answer this risk. The point here is it always stays relevant to the business people while you do your technical thing. This means always keeping a finger on the pulse of the business problem.
- Framing choices for the Important Person in terms of clear trade-offs of risk, investments, and completion. This engages the business in what your process is in a completely understandable way.
- Finally, if your manager doesn’t let you talk directly to the Important People in the business, and you can’t convince your manager to change his or her mind, then you might wanna polish up your LinkedIn profile, because otherwise you are fated to work on failed projects. Great advice.
A Code of Conduct for data scientists from the Bellagio Fellows
The 2013 PopTech & Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellows – Kate Crawford, Patrick Meier, Claudia Perlich, Amy Luers, Gustavo Faleiros and Jer Thorp – yesterday published “Seven Principles for Big Data and Resilience Projects” on Patrick Meier’s blog iRevolution.
Although they claim that these principles are meant for “best practices for resilience building projects that leverage Big Data and Advanced Computing,” I think they’re more general than that (although I’m not sure exactly what a resilience building project is) I and I really like them. They are looking for public comments too. Go to the post for the full description of each, but here is a summary:
1. Open Source Data Tools
Wherever possible, data analytics and manipulation tools should be open source, architecture independent and broadly prevalent (R, python, etc.).
2. Transparent Data Infrastructure
Infrastructure for data collection and storage should operate based on transparent standards to maximize the number of users that can interact with the infrastructure.
3. Develop and Maintain Local Skills
Make “Data Literacy” more widespread. Leverage local data labor and build on existing skills.
4. Local Data Ownership
Use Creative Commons and licenses that state that data is not to be used for commercial purposes.
5. Ethical Data Sharing
Adopt existing data sharing protocols like the ICRC’s (2013). Permission for sharing is essential. How the data will be used should be clearly articulated. An opt in approach should be the preference wherever possible, and the ability for individuals to remove themselves from a data set after it has been collected must always be an option.
6. Right Not To Be Sensed
Local communities have a right not to be sensed. Large scale city sensing projects must have a clear framework for how people are able to be involved or choose not to participate.
7. Learning from Mistakes
Big Data and Resilience projects need to be open to face, report, and discuss failures.
Are you cliterate?
Not much time this morning for blogging, but I wanted everyone to get a chance to read this amazing Huffington Post article about learning more than you ever thought possible about the female sexual organ, and then celebrating that knowledge in style.
The article is actually more inspiring than you’d think, and I found myself weeping with joy at times. I’m an easy cry, but still.
Plus, any article that has this picture is worth reading:
Upcoming talks
Tomorrow evening I’m meeting with the Columbia Data Science Society and talking to them – who as I understand it are mostly engineers – about “how to think like a data scientist”.
On October 11th I’ll be in D.C. sitting on a panel discussion organized by the Americans for Financial Reform. It’s part of a day-long event on the topic of transparency in financial regulation. The official announcement isn’t out yet but I’ll post it here as soon as I can. I’ll be giving my two cents on what mathematical tools can do and cannot do with respect to this stuff.
On October 16th I’ll again be in D.C. giving a talk in the MAA Distinguished Lecture Series to a mostly high school math teacher audience. My talk is entitled, “Start Your Own Netflix”.
Finally, I’m going to Harvard on October 30th to give a talk in their Applied Statistics Workshop series. I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m talking about but it will be something nerdy and skeptical.
I’d like you to eventually die
Google has formally thrown their hat into the “rich people should never die” arena, with an official announcement of their new project called Calico, “a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases”. Their plan is to use big data and genetic research to avoid aging.
I saw this coming when they hired Ray Kurzweil. Here’s an excerpt from my post:
A few days ago I read a New York Times interview of Ray Kurzweil, who thinks he’s going to live forever and also claims he will cure cancer if and when he gets it (his excuse for not doing it in his spare time now: “Well, I mean, I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.”). He also just got hired at Google.
Here’s the thing. We need people to die. Our planet cannot sustain all the people currently alive as well as all the people who are going to someday be born. Just not gonna happen. Plus, it would be a ridiculously boring place to live. Think about how boring it is already for young people to be around old people. I bore myself around my kids, and I’m only 30 years older than they are.
And yes, it’s tragic when someone we love actually becomes one of those people whose time has come, especially if they’re young and especially if it seemed preventable. For that matter, I’m all for figuring out how to improve the quality of life for people.
But the idea that we’re going to figure out how to keep alive a bunch of super rich advertising executives just doesn’t seem right – because, let’s face it, there will have to be a way to choose who lives and who dies, and I know who is at the top of that list – and I for one am not on board with the plan. Larry Page, Tim Cook, and Ray Kurzweil: I’d really like it if you eventually died.
On the other hand, I’m not super worried about this plan coming through either. Big data can do a lot but it’s not going to make people live forever. Or let’s say it another way: if they can use big data to make people live forever, they can also use big data to convince me that super special rich white men living in Silicon Valley should take up resources and airtime for the rest of eternity.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Peoples! Peoples!
I counted the new Aunt Pythia questions for this week and guess what number I got to?
ZERO! I have ZERO new questions this week!
Now luckily I had a few extra questions stored away so we’re good today, but you know just as well as I that this cannot go on.
Let me say it like this. Either you guys cough up some juicy sex dilemmas or Aunt Pythia goes back to the hospital. I don’t like to make threats, especially to nice little old ladies like Aunt Pythia (actually she’s not that small), but I’ll do whatever it takes. I’m ruthless.
In other words, enjoy today’s advice, but please:
don’t forget to ask a question at the bottom!!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My family friends are always asking me suggestions for books/resources to help nurture theirs kids’ interest in mathematics/sciences/engineering. The thing is the only books I could recommend are aimed at the high school level, while usually their kids are still in elementary. Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks,
Perennial educational advice giver in family
Dear Peagif,
My parents did a good job of not turning me off of math by not forcing it down my throat. I’m on that same page, and I never send my kids to math circle or have them read math books or science stuff. But I am always available for a conversation about science or math, and I have a ridiculous number of puzzles lying around the house, at all times.
We also keep well stocked in construction toys like Zome Tools. We also use Zome Tools to make bubbles and we have glow-in-the-dark versions too.
So that’s my advice: nerd toys rock, and they don’t feel pressured.
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am a postdoc in math and considering making a change to the private sector. I am still very active in research and teaching (in fact I quite like it, but I feel a change is necessary since academia requires too many compromises), and I am learning python on the side. I am not programming anything too hard-core yet; just little projects from free courses I can find online. I have two questions: right now my CV is very academia-oriented. How should I try to augment it to seem desirable in the wider world? Also, will my age become a serious liability the longer I wait (I am in my early thirties)?
Eagerly awaiting your response,
Liking Academia But Really Ambivalent There
Dear LABRAT,
Ooooooh, nice name. I got a good feeling about your future just from that alone.
So, two things. First, you’re doing it right, and I don’t think your age is a problem. You will want to supplement your math career and python learning with some actual data problems. Take a look around for a nice data set and try to ask a question that you don’t think anyone’s asked but people might care about. Team up with some other nerds trying to learn data stuff so it’s more fun.
Second, I’d like to hear more about your current “compromises”. As I might have mentioned before, my motto is, “you never get rid of your problems, you just get a new set of problems”.
So if you’re sick of the problems you have as an academic, then fine, leave and become a data scientist. But if you think there are no compromises in data science, then think again. They’re different but they exist.
So here’s an offer: you show me your compromises, and I’ll show you mine.
Love,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My tenure-track position is at a university with non-selective admissions, and it is my first experience of such a college or university (from any viewpoint). A few of my students are quite good, and many are reasonably smart and or reasonably hard-working, but overall, my feeling is that, if these people are our future, then we are doomed. And the statistics tell us that students here are still above average among 18-year-olds. I don’t think most of them could ever learn to code, unless you count copying someone else’s code and modifying a line or two to fix the spelling errors in the output as coding.
Am I going to start believing that we have to all go Amish and stop using technology in order to avoid some apocalypse and or dictatorial dystopia? Worse yet, in twenty years, will I be living in a shack in the woods and mailing bombs everywhere in a futile attempt to reverse the advance of technology?
I could try to get a job at a school with more academically capable students, but the job market is tough, and going to a college or university that would just reject less capable students seems to be just burying my head in the sand. Industry and most government jobs are out, not only because it’s also burying my head in the sand, but also because my previous stint in the computer industry sensitized me to the evil that every for profit organization has to do or be involved it just to stay in business.
Depressed by near universal stupidity
Dear Depressed,
It seems to me that you’re conflating two interesting but different issues. First, whether you should get another job, and where might you do that, and second, what it means that the majority of the citizens don’t understand, and perhaps can’t understand, their ambient environment at a technical level.
Let’s start with the second issue, since it’s honestly more interesting.
The real question is, what do you need to understand to make a living nowadays? Let’s face it, nobody feels compelled to really understand how a microwave works except microwave manufacturers and possibly cancer researchers (apologies to anyone who knows how a microwave works who I’ve left out).
It’s not fair, in other words, to expect everyone to understand everything about a society’s technology. For that matter technology has been around a long time, and the hallmark of a really good technology is that most people don’t have to think about it at all. For a non-microwave example, consider the idea that government itself can be seen as a technology – some big black box where money goes in and reasonable laws and order come out. Note I’m simplifying here.
If you buy that reasoning, then the next question is, why would we even want the majority of people to know how to code? Why don’t we leave that to the subpopulation of people working on stuff that needs coding? Coders are the equivalent of microwave manufacturers, albeit much better paid. It would be a huge waste for the entire population to learn that skill, even if they were interested and capable of doing so (although Miss Disruption would not agree).
So, to come back to you, you’re teaching at a school where most of the people who go to your school are not going to be technical. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do interesting things, of course, even if you don’t know what those interesting things are. And no, I don’t think living like the Amish would be a better option for them. They probably don’t think that what they do is so meaningless that they should replace it with manual labor in the fields.
But you could go ahead and do that yourself, it would solve your job problem, and it would also take you away from many of the people you consider so depressingly stupid.
If you want to get over your concerns, here’s something you could try. First, fully enjoy those students who are interested and good at the things you teach, and second, realize that people can lead super fulfilling and good lives doing nothing whatsoever technical. Indeed Amish people do it all the time, I’m sure, and get pleasure in being good members of the community or whatever floats their Amish boats. Give these young people some credit beyond the narrow question of whether they have this kind of talent and desire, and my guess is you’ll be less depressed.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
A couple of weeks ago, Aunt Pythia first posted a response to a question about a single person who masturbates to satisfy sexual urges, and if porn would help blah blah, and secondly, she responded to some nerds about fornicating in puzzle shops in hopes it might supply kinky role models to nerds everywhere, and in particular, possibly the ‘guy’ who asked the first question.
So, my question has to do with Aunt Pythia determining the sex of a particular poster, as the first thing I thought after reading that post was, “That poor woman needs to get laid!”
Does Aunt Pythia assume that all people who are single and masturbate without porn are guys, or should we be worried that she employs some Acxiom-style data warehousing techniques on her questions submission form?
Future Endeavors Are Remorseless
Dear FEAR,
Aunt Pythia fears (harhar) you have caught her in a lazy assumption, and she thank you for pointing it out. It is true that she assumed that the masturbator was male, and even though her original response to the masturbator was gender-neutral, her later reference to the masturbator was not. Apologies.
In Aunt Pythia’s defense, if it is allowed (and since this is her column, it is): if she had been going strictly by stereotypes, she might have assumed that the masturbator was female, since the masturbator had evidently never tried porn before. Just sayin’.
Love,
Aunt Pythia
——
Quick question, oh Aunt Pythia lovers: should Auntie P establish a twitter account and answer 140-character questions with 140-character words of advice? This was an idea from a twitter follower. I’m considering it but I need feedback. Maybe people asking for advice don’t want to use their twitter account to do it? Or maybe the idea would be Auntie P could first ask and then answer? Ideas welcome.
In the meantime, please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
The bursting of the big data bubble
It’s been a good ride. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a good time to be a data whiz, a quant-turned-data scientist. I get lots of attention and LinkedIn emails just for my title and my math Ph.D., and it’s flattering. But all of that is going to change, starting now.
You see, there are some serious headwinds. They started a while ago but they’re picking up speed, and the magical wave of hype propelling us forward is giving way. I can tell, I’ve got a nose for sinking ships and sailing metaphors.
First, the hype and why it’s been so strong.
It seems like data and the ability to use data is the secret sauce in so many of the big success stories. Look at Google. They managed to think of the entire web as their data source, and have earned quite a bit of respect and advertising money for their chore of organizing it like a huge-ass free library for our benefit. That took some serious data handling and modeling know-how.
We humans are pretty good at detecting patterns, so after a few companies made it big with the secret data sauce, we inferred that, when you take a normal tech company and sprinkle on data, you get the next Google.
Next, a few reasons it’s unsustainable
Most companies don’t have the data that Google has, and can never hope to cash in on stuff at the scale of the ad traffic that Google sees. Even so, there are lots of smaller but real gains that lots of companies – but not all – could potentially realize if they collected the right kind of data and had good data people helping them.
Unfortunately, this process rarely actually happens the right way, often because the business people ask their data people the wrong questions to being with, and since they think of their data people as little more than pieces of software – data in, magic out – they don’t get their data people sufficiently involved with working on something that data can address.
Also, since there are absolutely no standards for what constitutes a data scientist, and anyone who’s taken a machine learning class at college can claim to be one, the data scientists walking around often have no clue how to actually form the right questions to ask anyway. They are lopsided data people, and only know how to answer already well-defined questions like the ones that Kaggle comes up with. That’s less than half of what a good data scientist does, but people have no idea what a good data scientist does.
Plus, it’s super hard to accumulate hard evidence that you have a crappy data science team. If you’ve hired one or more unqualified data scientists, how can you tell? They still might be able to implement crappy models which don’t answer the right question, but in order to see that you’d need to also have a good data scientist who implements a better solution to the right question. But you only have one. It’s a counterfactual problem.
Here’s what I see happening. People have invested some real money in data, and they’ve gotten burned with a lack of medium-term results. Now they’re getting impatient for proof that data is an appropriate place to invest what little money their VC’s have offered them. That means they want really short-term results, which means they’re lowballing data science expertise, which means they only attract people who’ve taken one machine learning class and fancy themselves experts.
In other words, data science expertise has been commodified, and it’s a race to the bottom. Who will solve my business-critical data problem on a short-term consulting basis for less than $5000? Less than $4000?
What’s next?
There really is a difference between A) crude models that someone constructs not really knowing what they’re doing and B) thoughtful models which gain an edge along the margin. It requires someone who actually knows what they’re doing to get the latter kind of model. But most people are unaware of even the theoretical difference between type A and type B models, nor would they recognize which type they’ve got once they get one.
Even so, over time, type B models outperform type A models, and if you care enough about the marginal edge between the two types, say because you’re in a competitive environment, then you will absolutely need type B to make money. And by the way, if you don’t care about that marginal edge, then by all means you should use a type A solution. But you should at least know the difference and make that choice deliberately.
My forecast is that, once the hype wave of big data is dead and gone, there will emerge reasonable standards of what a data scientist should actually be able to do, and moreover a standard of when and how to hire a good one. It’ll be a rubrik, and possibly some tests, of both problem solving and communication.
Personally, I’m looking forward to a more reasonable and realistic vision of how data and data expertise can help with things. I might have to change my job title, but I’m used to it.
Book Club for Occupy Finance (#OWS)
We in Alternative Banking are pretty proud of our book Occupy Finance, and we’re planning on having a book club associated with it.
The idea is for the author of each chapter to come and lead a discussion about the subject in that chapter. We expect the feedback to improve the topic and be incorporated into the 2nd edition of the book.
Where: The book club will meet from 2-3pm on the Sundays mentioned below, before the regular Alternative Banking meeting, in Room 402 or 409 of the International Affairs Building of Columbia University at Amsterdam and 118th.
Here’s the schedule:
Occupy Finance Book Club Schedule
Awesome press for Occupy Finance #OWS
Yesterday was pretty amazing, in spite of the fact that we realized a page was missing from the book. The missing page, which was supposed to be between pages 38 and 39, is available here.
UPDATE: the online version of Occupy Finance is now complete.
Hey, but it’s still a great book, and we got lots of fantastic press. Here’s the list so far:
- FT Alphaville with Lisa Pollack
- NPR with Margot Adler
- Bloomberg with Matt Levine
- New York Times with William Alden
- Daily Kos with medicalquack
We also got a nice mention on occupy.com and a preview from member Jerry Ashton on his Huffington Post blog.
Thank you guys!
And readers, if you really want a copy of the book, send me email with your address. Our group meeting this Sunday will consist of an envelope-stuffing party. My email address is on my “About” page.
Woohoo!
Happy Birthday, Occupy Wall Street! #OWS
Hey, what are you doing for the 2nd anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park?
I know what I’m doing, namely going down to the park and handing out hundreds of copies of my occupy group’s new book – now on scribd!!. Here’s a ridiculous gif of the pile of books that came from the printer yesterday with my kindergartner posing by it (you might need to click on it to see the animation!!):
Someone isn’t shy.
I’m also planning a small speech at 10:15am, which I’m still writing. I’ll post it here later. here it is:
Thank you for coming
Thank you for occupying
I am here today to announce a birth
The birth of a book
It’s called “Occupy Finance”
We wrote it
we are Alternative BankingWho are we?
We are a working group of Occupy
we first met almost two years ago
we have been meeting ever since
we meet every Sunday afternoon
at Columbia University
our meetings are totally open
we want you to comeWe discuss the financial system
we discuss financial regulation
we discuss how lobbyists destroy regulation
we discuss how Obama destroys regulation
we discuss what we can do to help
how we can make our opinions known
how we can make the system work for us
the 99%Last year we had a project
The 52 Shades of Greed
we came here to Zuccotti Park
we gave out hundreds of packs of cards
they explained the financial system
they called out the criminals
they called out the toxic ideas
and the toxic instruments
and the toxic institutions
that started this messThis year we’ve come back
with another present to share
it’s a book we wrote
it’s a book for all of us
it explains how the financial system works
and how it doesn’t work
it explains how the system uses us
how the bankers scam us all
how the regulators fail to do their job
how the politicians have been boughtWhy did we write this book?
we wrote it for you
and we wrote it for us
we wrote it for anyone
who wants to know
how to argue against
the side of greed
the side of corruption
the side of entitlementlet me tell you something
some people call us radicals
but listen up
when the top 1%
capture 95% of the income gains
since the so-called end
of the recession,
when more than half the country thinks
that we didn’t do enough
to put bankers in jail,
when the median household income
has gone down 7.3% since 2007,
when the actual employment rate
is 5% below 2007,
when the jobs that do exist are crappy
when we get paid with prepaid debit cards
that nickel and dime us all
then what we demand is not radical
it is only a system that works
we are asking for a just system
we are asking for a fair system
we are asking for an end to too-big-to-fail
we demand banks take less risk
with our money
and we are asking lawmakers
to stop banks
once and for all
from scamming people because they are poorPlease join us
we want you to come
you don’t need to be an expert
we started out as strangers
who wanted to know how things work
we have become friends
we have become allies
we have made something
out of our curiousity
and out of our hard work
and we are here today
to share that with you
and to ask you to join us
please join us
happy birthday to us!
Thank you!!
mathbabe 