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Follow up on: math contests kind of suck
I have been really impressed with the comments and thoughts of my first post about how I think math contests kind of suck. Thinking about it some more, I’d like to make two corrections to my original thoughts as well as a clarification.
The first correction is that it’s the MAA, not the NSF, that mysteriously only seems to support contests, or at least for the most part supports contests and not enrichment. The NSF, as has been pointed out in the comments, mysteriously supports primarily college-level math enrichment (through REUs) instead of high-school level stuff, but that’s a different mystery.
The second correction is that, instead of saying about contests “most people don’t get close to winning, and in particular give those people the impression that because they lost a contest they don’t “have it” when it comes to math,” I should have said, “most people don’t get close to winning, and for the subset of people who care about winning, in gives them the impression that because they lost a contest they don’t “have it” when it comes to math.” In other words, I’m not discussing the subpopulation who don’t care if they win. (To those people I’d say: you are rare and you are lucky.)
Except I am discussing them, and this is where the clarification comes in. My point about girls is this: girls are more likely to be in the subpopulation of kids who care, and therefore more likely to be disappointed in themselves. In fact I would add that girls are more likely to underestimate their performance, even if it was great, and moreover they are more likely to do badly in the presence of the negative stereotype that tells them girls aren’t good at math.
These are all statistical statements. In particular, an argument that won’t convince me I’m wrong is something like: I’m a guy and I didn’t care if I won or lost and I loved (or hated) contests. That just means you are not in the population of kids I am talking about. Another argument that won’t convince me I’m wrong goes like this: I’m a guy and I cared and I did awesome. In fact won’t even really change my mind if a woman writes and said she cared and did badly (or well) but loved (or hated) them anyway. Because what I’m talking about is essentially a statistical statement, and idiosyncratic examples probably won’t change my mind.
In fact I’d argue that it’s very very difficult to prove or disprove my claim, at least with comments, because there’s a strong survivorship bias in place, namely that people who got scared away from math won’t be reading my blog at all. In order to give evidence to support or discredit my claim we would have to look at examples of populations which were or weren’t exposed to enrichment, versus contests, versus perhaps something else (like no math outside their classroom) and see who became mathematicians. Oh wait here’s something.
By the way, it’s important to make clear that I’m not suggesting stripping contest math out of the picture altogether. I think there’s a case to be made that they’re better than nothing. But we don’t need to settle for nothing! However, I think we should be creating alternatives that are not competitive or timed. I was very happy to hear about the month-long test and I also heard about a team 24-hour test (does anyone know the name of that and if it still exists?)
Two last tangentially related issues:
- I would argue that any time a bunch of nerd kids get together they have a blast. So we definitely should be getting math nerd kids together. We just shouldn’t be having them compete against each other. I claim they’d have an even better time that way.
- Also, has anyone else noticed the prevalence of girls who are good at competitions and very involved fathers? It’s really interesting. My dad is a mathematician too, and many (but not all) of the women mathematicians I know have heavily involved and/or mathematical dads.
_Love_ you people
I’d like to make a shout-out today to a bunch of people.
First, my readers, who are gorgeous, sexy, and brilliant people. Thanks for reading.
Second, my commenters, who are thoughtful, gorgeous, sexy, and brilliant people, especially when they back me the fuck up. Go, you people! I’m nearly at a 3-to-1 comment-to-post ratio, which makes me feel pretty awesome. I’ve learned a whole bunch and met some pretty amazing people recently through their comments. I’ve actually been please to discover that I really enjoy being disagreed with and argued with- it makes it so much faster to learn. So keep the (constructive) criticisms coming!
Next, I’d like to throw out a bunch of links to blogs which I really like. Actually I recently created a blog roll so there’s that. But in particular I’d like you to check out some of my favorites:
- My good friend Jordan Ellenberg has a wonderful blog entitled “Quomodocumque“, whatever that means (oh wait! it means “whatever” in Latin; I wonder if that is meant sarcastically), in which he muses about math (Rubik’s cubes included!) and… whatever.
- Just in case you’ve somehow missed the whole String Theory Debate, please inform yourself at Peter Woit’s blog called “Not Even Wrong”. When I taught at the Columbia math department, as a Barnard math professor, I used to eat lunch with Peter every day at the Mill Korean on Broadway and 112th. What was adorable about Peter is that every frigging day, and I mean every day, he’d read the menu, look a bit confused, and then order beef fried rice. And then he’d give me his Chiclets at the end of the meal. I’m not sure why this story would recommend his blog to you but it certainly endears him to me. His blog rocks btw.
- Andrew Gelman’s blog titled Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science has a pretty awesome post today about economists (who doesn’t love hating on economists?!).
- I just found this blog, Quantivity, which contains impressively informed finance stuff, and is more technical than what I’m going for.
- Check out a new game theory blog, called Nuclear Chicken Collusion, which comes up with very readable, fun versions of fancy ideas. Their most recent post talks about the probability of there being a god and what it means for you.
High frequency trading
This morning there was an article in the New York Times describing high frequency traders- what they do and how they want people to like them. I’m of the mind that there’s not much to like.
NOTE: Please see update!
High frequency traders are basic, old-fashioned opportunists. They buy somewhere and try to sell somewhere else cheaper. They have expensive technology and colocate next to exchanges to deal with speed-of-light issues to shave off tiny fractions of seconds for their trades. They notice a currency change in Brazil and trade on it in the US before anyone else notices. That kind of thing.
They will tell you that they are useful to the market, because they have set the bid-ask spread smaller than it used to be. Back in the day, there were official “market makers” who would maintain a book of certain instruments, and would be the go-to person for anyone who wanted to buy or sell. In return for the service they would charge a fee, which would be this so-called spread. Moreover, they were required to offer to buy and to sell in all kinds of trading environments (the spreads could get pretty wide of course).
It’s true that those spreads have gotten smaller since high-frequency traders have come to dominate. They have substantially replaced the old-school market makers and claim to be doing a better job. However, it’s also true that high-frequency traders aren’t required to be there. So when the going gets tough they completely vanish. This happens in moments of panic, and it can easily be true that their ability to vanish at will can also create more panics more often (I’d love some evidence to support or deny this theory), since from their perspective, at the first sign of weirdness, they may as well pull out until the dust settles.
The analogy I like to come up with is a little story about chores. Suppose you have someone who comes and helps you with your cleaning, mostly dishes, every day, for a small fee. Since you have kids and a job, the small fee seems to be worth it. After a while someone else comes along and offers to do your dishes every day! for free!! What a deal! You can’t resist. However, it turns out that, if the kitchen actually gets really dirty and needs to be mopped up or seriously cleaned, the free-dishes guy is nowhere to be found and you’re on your own, just when all the kids are sick and there’s a product release at work. Maybe not such a great deal after all.
I love math nerd kids
So I’m almost at the end of my second week here at HCSSiM, and the pathetic truth is I already miss these kids. They are so freaking adorable, and of course I miss my own kids so much, that the emotional turmoil of the situation combines to create the reality that I am actually nostalgic for each moment with them before that moment happens. Pathetic!! It’s something about identifying with their nerdy selves finding each other and figuring out that they have a community of nerds that accepts them… whatever, now I’m tearing up. Pitiful.
As for what I’m teaching them, the first week it was number theory, number theory, and more number theory. Can you tell I like number theory? At the end of the first week I looked around and I saw a bunch of earnest faces wondering if I was going to prove yet another thing about relatively prime numbers and solving polynomials modulo n and I thought to myself, these kids are going to think there’s no other examples of proof by induction! How shameless! So this week I talked about graph theory. Next week: I’m going back to number theory. Yes I know, but it’s AWESOME. I’m going to talk about Farey numbers and continued fractions and maybe the Pell equation. They will know all about the golden ratio and maybe we’ll even measure each other’s faces. I can’t wait.
Last night we went to the director’s house and ate corn on the cob (we made the kids husk the corn- did you know teenagers today have mostly never husked corn before in their lives?) and pizza and we played “Mafia,” which was hilarious and sweetly innocent.
This weekend is “Yellow Pig day” at the camp program, which is a day where we celebrate yellow pigs and the number 17. We take this incredibly seriously, including making t-shirts with yellow pigs, having a 4-hour (feels like 17) talk about interesting properties of the number 17, and finally, singing yellow pig carols and eating a yellow pig cake at the end. It’s a wild time for math nerd kids. They will remember this and each other for the rest of their lives. Woohoo!!
Did I mention that I was a minor celebrity last night because I solved a 7x7x7 Rubik’s cube in front of them? This is status at its best. I even showed them my trick, and one of the kids came back to me at breakfast this morning proudly displaying his cube with a 3-cycle. Update: he has solved his entire cube using 3-cycles. Now he’s moving on to a dodecahedron puzzle.
LOVE these kids.
Bank accounting link
I wanted to share this link with you; it is both interesting and relevant to another post I’m working on (a follow up to this one) that will describe two ideas I’m contemplating regarding how to systematically change the way big banks are motivated to behave in the presence of the “too big to fail” guarantee.
Its goal is to describe how banks will behave in a given situation with a mortgage, but the thought process generalizes quite well to how banks behave in general, and in particular how accounting considerations trump utility to the depositors and even the long-term shareholders. It also explains, to those of us who were wondering, why Obama’s mortgage modification plan was never going to work.
Short Post!
I’ve been told my posts are intimidatingly long, what with the twitter generation’s sound byte attention span. Normally I’d say, screw that! It’s because my ideas are so freaking nuanced they can’t be condensed to under a paragraph without losing their essence!
But today I acquiesce; here’s a short post containing at most one idea.
Namely, I’ve been getting pretty strong reactions online and offline regarding my post about whether an academic math job is a crappy job. I just want to set the record straight: I’m not even saying it’s a crappy job, I’m simply talking about someone else’s essay which describes it that way. But moreover, even if I were saying that, I would only be saying it’s crappy (which I’m not) compared to other jobs that very very smart mathy people could get. Obviously in the grand scheme of things it’s a very good job- safe working conditions, regular hours, well-respected, etc., and many people in this world have far crappier jobs and would love a job with those conditions. But relative to other jobs that math people could be getting, it may not be the best.
Many professors of math (you know who you are) have this weird narrow world view, that they feed their students, which goes something like, “if you want to be a success, you should be exactly like me (which is to say, an academic)”. So anyone who gets educated in a math department is apt to run into all these people who define success as getting tenure in an academic math department, and they just don’t know about or consider other kinds of gigs. It would be nice if there was a way to get a more balanced view of the pros and cons of all of the options.
Weekend Reading
FogOfWar and I have compiled a short list of weekend reading for you that you may enjoy:
- What’s the right way to think about China’s economy?
- Is Japan’s “lost decades” a media myth?
- Can I hear a FUCK YEAH for Elizabeth Warren? I feel a follow-up post coming on how much she rocks.
- Get ready to be depressed by how few natural resources there really are.
- This essay really pins Robert Rubin to the wall in a totally awesome way. I will add more in another post.
- The Republicans are holding the entire nation for ransom over the possibility of default. Is it all political posturing? Or is it for the sake of the insanely shitty idea of a tax repatriation holiday? Here’s another article about this crappy idea; when Bloomberg makes you out as a selfish bastard then you know you’re a truly selfish bastard. I’m convinced that the politicians (and union leaders) arguing for this are just counting on the average person not understanding the actual issues well enough to know how evil it is (and how much kickback they must be getting). Another example of asymmetric information that really gets my goat.
- I think it’s fair to say we all need a little more of this in our lives.
Fair Foods
This post will only be indirectly quantitative, and not a rant, so I guess that means I will have to either apologize or change my mission statement. Sorry. Oh and by the way I do have lots of ideas for quantitative blogs coming up, topics to include:
- clear your cookies! how internet companies track your every click
- update on the diabetes model
- is being a mathematician just a crappy job?
- shout-outs to other nerd bloggers who are sending me readers
So yesterday I loaded up the (rental) car to the brim, with my mom, my two older sons, a guitar (for me) and an air conditioning unit (for my mom), and drove out to Amherst for the math program I’m teaching in for three weeks.
Before I left I visited my friend Nancy at Fair Foods in Dorchester.
I drove to her house early, getting there at maybe 8:30am. She wasn’t home- she had me meet her at a church near Codman Square, where she was making a drop. When I got there I helped her unload a van full of maybe 40 or so boxes of vegetables and fruit, with a few 50-pound bags of carrots and potatoes. She got on the van and handed me the boxes and I carried them over to a sidewalk, while the woman, Marie, who was accepting the drop, carried some smaller boxes into the basement. Nancy introduced me to Marie as her daughter, and introduced Marie to me as the beautiful, wise Haitian woman who was a professional cook and would turn all of these vegetables into a delicious feast for her congregation. Nancy and Marie talked about the church, and the fact that it was shared between two different congregations, one Haitian immigrant and one African-American, and how the church was run.
After a while it didn’t seem like Marie was going to get the help she was expecting to carry the larger boxes into the basement, so Nancy and I moved all of the boxes down there, temporarily rigging a window to be a de facto dumb waiter to avoid three corners and some stairs. There were tomatoes, white potatoes, red potatoes, carrots, ugli fruit, limes, lettuce, string beans, wax beans, and others I can’t remember. Almost all of these were in great condition, but some needed sorting before going into the feast. Marie asked for corn for the 4th of July- since the food that is collected is surplus, a given request may be hard to fill, especially around a holiday, which Nancy explained. But then she said that if we got corn we would call Marie right away.
After we finished unloading the van I was soaked in sweat; it reminded me of how incredibly strong I’d gotten working one summer for Nancy, unloading trucks all day (as well as loading them at the Chelsea Produce Market every morning at 7) and driving around the city in the big yellow truck making drops to churches, senior centers, and youth centers, and holding dollar-a-bag sites in vacant parking lots and sidestreets. That was in 1992; and Nancy, who was born in 1950, has been doing the program ever since, with various peoples’ help.
Nancy mentioned that before I’d gotten there she had gone into the church and listened to the singing and the praying of the Haitian congregation, and that it had been seriously beautiful. Marie insisted on us coming inside. We sat in the pews as the woman leading the small prayer group of about 8 people, mostly women, was talking to one woman who was clearly in distress. Perhaps she was in mourning. They were speaking in Creole, which I don’t understand (although I know some French so every now and then I can pick up a word or two), but it was viscerally moving how kindly the leader was speaking to the sad woman seated in front of her. After she allowed that woman to finish, she looked up and welcomed us in English and asked us our names. Marie explained in Creole something about us, probably that we had just brought in the food for the July 4th meal, and we were instantly welcomed by the entire group. After that they told us they were wrapping up their prayer session and would stand and have a group prayer.
Everyone stood, except for the mourning woman who was holding her head in her hands. And at once everyone started praying, but the interesting thing was they were all saying different prayers, and it was fascinating to watch and listen to how they could be both praying together and praying individually. I could make out a few words from Marie’s prayer, which near the beginning was quiet and included lots of words like “please” and “hope”, but which, like everyone else’s, became louder and more fervent and contained more words like “thank you” and “hallelujah”. It ended by everyone holding their hands up to the front of them and giving thanks. Everyone ended at exactly the same time.
After the prayer group ended, there were lots of hugs and hand shaking. Many of the women wanted to talk to Nancy and she probably ended up hugging and being hugged by everyone there. There was a deep human connection inside that little church, which is pretty different from my normal assumptions about piousness and rules-based religions. Connection and empathy.
After we left the church we went to a playground and sat and had coffee together, and Nancy laid something down that was pretty thick. She talked about her disillusionment with her generation- the hippy generation- how they made all these promises but then didn’t follow through- the words she uses is didn’t apply themselves. She talked about having faith in her generation up to the “We Are the World” moment, and then waiting, and seeing nothing come out of it, and how bitter that had made her feel, how disappointed. She said it took her years to get over that, and now she feels like those years of her life, until recently in fact, are in some sense unaccounted for, both because she’s been sick and because she was somewhat paralyzed with anger.
She went on to say that she’s in a new phase now, she’s accepted the lazy fact of life that the people she was counting on, if anything, have made the world a worse place, not a better one, but that she’s decided to love them and love the world anyway, and to continue to make human connections with individuals, because it makes her have faith in a different way, a more diffuse but a stronger faith that won’t be disappointed.
It’s interesting to me that Nancy would ever describe her life as unaccounted for or her feelings as bitter. When I met her in 1989, she had been diagnosed with MS and lived in a huge old house with very little working anything (and what was working she’d installed herself- wired the electricity and installed plumbing). She had a great Dane and a broken-down donated truck, and when I came to her we spent the whole night cleaning out and reorganizing the truck. Whenever the truck’s insurance was due, or the phone was about to be cut off, we’d get a check for $50 and it would be a miracle, and I always felt like if I was ever going to believe in something it would be because of her.
I fell in love with her and with her approach to problem solving- namely, do the right thing, and go figure how to with bare knuckles and sweat. Over the years she’s been better or worse off with her health, but she’s never given up and, to be honest, I never sensed bitterness from her. Maybe these are relative notions, that bitterness from her is like frustration from someone else. Unaccountability from the woman who moves tons of food a week, that will otherwise be thrown away, into the homes of impoverished, mostly immigrant households, who know her and appreciate her act of kindness and take part in that act, would mean… what? to other people. Hard to say.
Did you have a happy childhood?
For whatever reason, I’ve been thinking about my childhood recently. Partly it’s the post I wrote about why I chose to call myself “mathbabe”, partly it’s an old essay of Jonathan Franzen’s that got me all riled up (in a good way). Plus I’m traveling to the math camp of my youth to teach, and stopping on the way in Harvard Square at my parents’ house; that’s enough to make you reconsider your memories in short order.
I have never understood what people mean when they talk about carefree, happy childhoods. I think I’ve always assumed this to be some kind of ironic joke, or maybe a plastered-over memory, a convenient approach to pain management. While it’s true that children have fewer responsibilities than grown-ups, it’s really not the responsibilities of adulthood that weigh me down (says the woman with three kids), or ever did. For me it was the constant awareness of my helplessness and impotence, my inability to decide my own fate, my feeling of having to wait forever for freedom, that got to me. I was also teased, but not relentlessly, and I did have friends, and moreover I wasn’t thought of (I don’t think) as a worrying child. From the outside people may have imagined me as a normal albeit nerdy kid. However, I always identified with the oppressed, and I had a keen sense of fairness which was constantly being challenged by reality. When we studied the “Manifest Destiny” in third grade, it killed me to think of the white man’s assumptions. When I saw a kid getting bullied at school, it tore me up that I didn’t know how to put an end to it and no teachers bothered. The list goes on, you get the idea. Also, I had an internal standard that was painfully high- I wanted to become a musician, a pianist, but never thought I’d be good enough, and I questioned my creativity, since what I really wanted to do was compose. When I decided to become a mathematician I started worrying about my thesis (I was 16). By the way, lest people get the wrong impression, my parents never put pressure on me to play music (in fact they openly discouraged me since it was expensive) and thought my worrying about my thesis was downright amusing. This was all internally generated. In short, I was a struggler, at best of times a striver, but never ever carefree and happy.
I have always been attracted to other people who struggle and strive; for the most part my closest friends are, like me, in constant flux with respect to their identities and their goals and even the interpretation of the most basic cultural assumptions like toenail polish and the role of the FDIC.
This brings me to the Franzen essay, where he talks about being isolated in childhood as a reader, and spending the rest of your life trying to find and form a community with other isolated readers. As an aside, Franzen makes a distinction in this essay between isolated readers and isolated math or technology nerds. He basically said that math nerds are isolated because they are autistic, incapable of social interaction, whereas readers are isolated because they feel more deeply and can’t relate to artificiality. I’m not sure whether to argue that math nerds aren’t all autistic or just count myself as both a reader and a math nerd and be proud of out-isolating Franzen, no easy task. Basically, I agree with Franzen. From my perspective upon meeting someone I am always looking for that inner torture, the hallmark of an examined life. It doesn’t make you happy, perhaps, but it makes you real, and moreover interesting.
But here’s the thing, I was blindsided this week by the discovery that my husband, of all people, had a happy childhood. He insists on this, even when I ask him if perhaps he’s misremembering his inner turmoil– he claims no. He moreover avers that, at the age of 12, he decided to become a mathematician and has never looked back, never once questioned that decision. Is this possible? That I’m married to a man who had a happy childhood? For all I know, it is true and moreover it may be exactly why I have a happy marriage. Maybe strugglers need to be married to non-strugglers to maintain some kind of balance. I don’t know, I’m still thinking about it. It does explain something that I’ve always been confused by, though- when my husband comes across an ethical or moral decision, he does so painlessly and makes a decision instantaneously. I now think this is because he just doesn’t think about things like that in between those moments, and so he’s got a clarity of consciousness which allows him to make snap decisions. When I come across such dilemmas, I am much more confused and ambivalent. I usually decide it’s a matter of opinion. I’m wondering if it’s this element of our differences that makes our marriage work.
mathbabe 