Archive
VAM versus what?
A few astute readers pointed out to me that in the past few days I both slammed the Value-added teacher’s model (VAM) and complained about people who reject something without providing an alternative. Good point, and today I’d like to start that discussion.
What should we be doing instead of VAM?
First of all, I do think that not rating teachers at all is better than the current system. So my “compare the the status quo” argument goes through in this instance. Namely, VAM is actively discouraging teachers whereas leaving them alone entirely would neither discourage or encourage anyone. So better than this.
At the same time, I am a realist, and I think there should be, ultimately, a system of evaluating teachers, just as there is a system for evaluating me at work. The difference between my workplace, of 45 people, and the NYC public schools is scale. It makes sense to have a very large and consistent evaluation system in the NYC public schools, whereas my job can have an ad hoc inconsistent system without it being a problem.
There’s another problem which is nearly impossible to tease from this discussion. Namely, the fact that what’s going on in NYC is a disingenuous political game between Bloomberg and the teacher’s union. Just to emphasize how important that fight is, let’s keep in mind that as of now, although the union is much weaker than it historically has been, it still has the tenure system. So any model, VAM or not, of evaluation is somewhat irrelevant for “removing bad teachers” given that they have tenure and tenure still means something.
Probably the best way to decouple the “Bloomberg vs. union/tenure” issue (a massive one here in NYC) from the “VAM versus other” question is to think nationally rather than citywide.
The truth is, the VAM is being tried out all over the country (although I don’t have hard numbers on this) and the momentum is for it to be used more and more. I predict within 10 years it will be done systematically everywhere in the country.
And, sadly, that’s kind of my prediction whether or not the underlying model is any good or not! The truth is, there is a large contingent of technocrats who want control over the evaluation system and believe in the models, whether or not they are producing pure noise or not. In other words, they believe in “data driven decisioning” as a holy grail even though there’s scant evidence that this will work in schools. And they also don’t want to back down now, even though the model sucks, because they feel like they’ll be losing momentum on the overall data-driven approach.
One thing I know for sure is that we should continue to be aware of how badly the current models are, and I want to set up an open source version of the models (see this post to get an idea how it could work) to exhibit that. In other words, even if we don’t turn off the models altogether, can’t we at least minimize their importance while their quality is bad? The first step is to plainly exhibit how bad they are.
It’s hard for me to decide what to do next, though. I’m essentially a modeler who is hugely skeptical of models. In fact, I don’t think using purely quantitative models to evaluate teachers is the right thing to do, period. Yet I feel like if it’s definitely going to happen, better for people like me to be in the middle of it, pointing out how bad the proposed (or in use) models are actually performing, and improving them.
One thing I know I’d do if I were to be put in charge of creating a better model: I’d train on data where the teacher is actually rated as a good teacher or not. In other words, I wouldn’t proxy “good teacher” by “if your students scored better than expected on tests”. A good model would be trained on data where there would be an expert teacher scorer, who would go into 500 classrooms and carefully evaluate the actual teachers, based on things like whether the teacher asked questions, or got the kids engaged, or talked too much or too little, or imposed too much busy work, etc. Then the model would be trying to mimic this expert.
Of course there are lots of really complicated issues to sort out- and they are *totally unavoidable*. This is why I’m so skeptical of models, by the way: people think you can simplify stuff when you actually can’t. There’s nothing simple about teaching and whether someone’s a good teacher. It’s just plain complex. A simple model will be losing too much information.
Here’s one. Different people think good teaching is different. A possible solution: maybe we could have 5 different “expert models” based on different people’s definitions of good teaching, and every teacher could be evaluated based on every model. Still need to find those 5 experts that teachers trust.
Here’s another. The kind of teacher-specific attributes collected for this test would be different from the VAM- things that happen inside a classroom (like percentage of time teacher talks vs. student, the tone of the discussion, the number and percentage of kids involved in the discussion, etc,) and are harder to capture accurately. These are technological hurdles that are hard.
I think one of the most important questions is whether we can come up with an evaluation system that would be sufficiently reasonable and transparent that the teachers themselves would get on board.
I’d to hear more ideas.
Versus what?
I’m going to specialize in short, curmudgeony blog posts this week.
Today’s topic: you always need something to compare a new thing with. It’s this versus what?
If it’s a model, compare it to noise. That is, go ahead and test a model by scrambling the “y”s and see how well your model predicts randomness. It’s a really good and inexpensive way of seeing whether your model is better than noise, so go ahead and do it. There’s even a name for this but I forget what it is (update from reader: permutation testing).
If it’s a plan for a system or the world, compare it to the status quo. I’m so sick of people discarding good plans because they’re not perfect. If they’re better than what’s currently going on, then let’s go with that. Which brings me to my last example.
If it’s someone’s proposal (person A), compare it to other proposals (person B). I don’t think it’s fair for people (person C) to nix an idea unless they come up with a better one. If person C is consistently doing that, it’s a good bet that they have something to protect in the status quo situation, which brings us to the previous example.
Charity auctions and hate crimes
I read an absolutely incredible story last night on Bloomberg.
This Morgan Stanley executive William Jennings (co-head of North American fixed-income capital markets) is being charged with a hate crime. Let me piece it together a bit.
On December 22nd Jennings hosted a charity auction at Morgan Stanley until 6pm, then went to Ink48, a hotel in midtown on the west side. After partying on the rooftops for some time, and drinking, his car service didn’t show up fast enough for him so he hailed a cab to take him to Connecticut, where he lives with his wife and three kids in a $3.4 million house.
When he got to Connecticut, he got into a fight with the cab driver and ended up refusing to pay, stabbing the guy in his hand with a knife (which required 60 stitches) while using ethnic slurs. Then he went away to Florida for two weeks on the DL. My favorite line from the article:
Jennings fell asleep during the trip, the driver said. Once at the destination, though, Jennings said “he did not feel like paying” because he was already home.
Up for debate and the trial: did he really refuse to pay or was he just arguing his fare? Was it really 60 stitches or is that an exaggeration? Did he really use ethnic slurs? I’m throwing in these questions because I want to be correct and because the overall point of my post won’t depend on these details anyway.
Not up for debate: he stabbed the cabbie, it was definitely an argument over money, and he was worried enough to go to Florida for two weeks.
Okay, now that I’ve summed this up I’m gonna connect it to charity auctions. Yes I am.
I’ve been to charity auctions myself. I want to devote an entire post to describing what such an event consists of; for now take it from me that they are orgies of self-congratulatory arrogance. And ironically, they are not at all charitable in the sense of being generous and tolerant.
They are in fact celebrations of self-centeredness, displays of careless overabundance. Yes, I’ll pay $120k to go to Australia for a week to golf, and I’ll do it for the poor children, and by the way also because I can afford to throw away such money and especially by the way because everyone in this room now knows that.
So I think it’s extra deliciously ironic that this guy went from that atmosphere to arguing with an Egyptian cabbie over a $200 fare (or maybe $300, if we want to be generous to Jennings and believe his “extortionist cabbie” sob story).
But my point is that, although the cab ride was a different atmosphere from the charity auction, his was not a different attitude at all: both parts of his evening centered on assumptions of entitlement and selfishness and the idea that he is somehow outside the regular rules and cannot be held accountable like normal people. From the article:
He then went on vacation to Florida, police said. Jennings told officers he subsequently called his lawyer after a friend told him police were looking for a suspect in the stabbing incident, according to the report.
“Jennings said he didn’t know what to do — he just wanted the whole thing to go away,” Darien Police Detective Chester Perkowski said in a court document filed with the report.
The part about the car service not showing up is absolutely key: these guys use car services a lot, and when you do that, you get used to not paying for such trivial little things as rides, or for that matter food or drinks. All such things are handed to you for free when you are this important (read: rich). Paying, writing a check or what have you, is reserved for ostentatious displays of wealth. I know hedge fund guys that don’t even carry money in their wallet because they never use cash. Actually I don’t know them personally but I know that this is true because they brag about it in the elevators.
I’m not trying to generalize this story – most Morgan Stanley execs haven’t been charged with knifing down working class cabbies. But it’s impossible for me not to see the consistency in the two events.
This is water
I just started reading Infinite Jest and it’s blowing my mind.
I’m a nerd so I had never heard of David Foster Wallace before reading his book, but now I’ve officially joined his cult. If I’m too late to this party I will start my own, one-woman cult.
As far as I’m concerned he’s the Elliott Smith of literature.
If you haven’t already, please read this, Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College. I read it at work yesterday and bawled into my keyboard for about 20 minutes.
Teaching scores released
Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows how detestable I think it is that the teacher value-added model scores are being released but the underlying model is not.
We are being shown scores of teachers and we are even told the scores have a wide margin of error: someone who gets a 30 out of 100 could next year get a 70 out of 100 and nobody would be surprised (see this article).
Just to be clear, the underlying test doesn’t actually use a definition of a good teacher beyond what the score is. In other words, this model isn’t being trained by looking at examples of what is a “good teacher”. Instead, it derived from another model which predicts students’ test scores taking into account various factors. At the very most you can say the teacher model measures the ability teachers have to get their kids to score better or worse than expected on some standardized tests. Call it a “teaching to the test model”. Nothing about learning outside the test. Nothing about inspiring their students or being a role model or teaching how to think or preparing for college.
A “wide margin of error” on this value-added model then means they have trouble actually deciding if you are good at teaching to the test or not. It’s an incredibly noisy number and is affected by things like whether this year’s standardized tests were similar to last year’s.
Moreover, for an individual teacher with an actual score, being told there’s a wide margin of error is not helpful at all. On the other hand, if the model were open source (and hopefully the individual scores not public), then a given teacher could actually see their margin of error directly: it could even be spun as a way of seeing how to “improve”. Otherwise said, we’d actually be giving teachers tools to work with such a model, rather than simply making them targets.
update: Here’s an important comment from a friend of mine who works directly with New York City math teachers:
Thanks for commenting on this. I work with lots of public school math teachers around New York City, and have a sense of which of them are incredible teachers who inspire their students to learn, and which are effective at teaching to the test and managing their behavior.
Curiosity drove me to it, but I checked out their ratings. The results are disappointing and discouraging. The ones who are sending off intellectually engaged children to high schools were generally rated average or below, while the ones who are great classroom managers and prepare their lessons with priority to the tests were mostly rated as effective or above.
Besides the huge margin of uncertainty in this model, it’s clear that it misses many dimensions of great teaching. Worse, this model, now published, is an incentive for teachers to develop their style even more towards the tests.
If you don’t believe me or Japheth, listen to Bill Gates, who is against publicly shaming teachers (but loves the models). From his New York Times op-ed from last week:
Many districts and states are trying to move toward better personnel systems for evaluation and improvement. Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a measurement of their impact on students’ test scores — and publicizing the names and rankings online and in the media. But shaming poorly performing teachers doesn’t fix the problem because it doesn’t give them specific feedback.
If nothing else, the Bloomberg administration should also look into statistics regarding whether it’s become a more attractive or less attractive profession since he started publicly shaming teachers. Has introducing the models and publicly displaying the results had the intended effect of keeping good teachers and getting rid of bad ones, Mayor Bloomberg?
I am the most boring person in the world
A few nights ago I went to a CFPB Town Hall Meeting after work. The discussion in the kitchen that morning went something like this:
me: “I’m going to be late tonight, guys, because I’m going to a CFPB Town Hall meeting… I’m really excited about it!”
my husband: “What the hell is CFPB?”
me: “Oh, it stands for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You know, the thing that Elizabeth Warren started but then didn’t get to be in charge of? I need to go see if this guy Cordray is going to be pushy enough to lead an effective government agency. Today the issues at the meeting are things like checking accounts and debit cards and overdraft policies. I totally need to go, can you guys eat leftovers?”
my husband: “You are the most boring person in the world”
my three sons, simultaneously: “Yeah mom, he’s right. You are the most boring person in the world.”
Whatever. I guess they’re right, but I went anyway. After lots of incredibly congratulatory introductions, including a 5 minutes speech from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, there were a bunch of questions from the audience.
There were lots of community groups represented, as well as individuals. Two themes emerged through the questions that seem like particularly egregious consumer issues affecting poor people.
First was the issue of pre-paid debit cards and the corresponding fees. This guy stood up at the microphone and described his friend who get a debit card for child support, court-ordered. But this debit card extracts enormous fees every time she takes money out, including things like $5 just to check the balance. The guy was saying, you know my friend needs that money for her children, and it’s not fair that so much of it goes to fees- it’s abusive. I was totally crying. I mean, I’m an easy cry, but still. That wasn’t the only story about such debit cards where there was no choice in the matter but the fees were extortionist.
Second the issue of Walmart issuing its pay to people in debit card form came up time after time as well. So it seems that Walmart is not only a retailer, but also a financial institution of the crappiest kind now. It issues debit cards as payment to people who don’t accept direct deposit or don’t have checking accounts, and again it seems that the money on the cards is somehow deeply tied to a fee structure. I need to look into this more (as does the CFPB) but I’m wondering off the top of my head whether people can just demand to be paid in cash instead. It’s like these people are being paid really badly, with very few benefits, and even when they get paid they’re being nickeled and dimed every step of the way. It’s like it’s not really their money even then.
So in other words, debit cards are the new check cashers, but maybe worse since their fee structure doesn’t seem to be as transparent.
Of course, I took the opportunity to ask a question too, since I am not shy. And I was told not to ask a question but rather to tell a story, but whatever, I decided to phrase is as “making three suggestions.” After introducing myself as coming from the Alternative Banking group, I mentioned the following:
- The CFPB should use its powers to bring together mortgage investors and homeowners to the same table, in order to align their interests and bypass the banks as servicers, since the banks are only endlessly delaying the process in order to extract fees.
- I mentioned that our group is working on a “find a credit union app” but that the CFPB should really be doing that with us, to help underbanked people find alternatives to crappy banking solutions (like debit cards).
- I mentioned that we had submitted a public comment letter demanding that the credit score models be open sourced, since there was no legitimate reason for such models, which directly affect consumers in their daily lives, to be kept proprietary.
Akshat was there too, from Occupy the SEC, and he asked about the Volcker Rule.
Condray took notes. I mean, what’s he going to say.
Well actually sometimes he did say stuff, like to Akshat, and for the most part it was something along the lines of, “that is not in our jurisdiction”, although there was one exception when he talked about how Walmart, being a retailer, is not in his jurisdiction but since it’s acting as a banking institution it actually is.
Overall I’m a bit disappointed. Although I did certainly like the fact that he held a town hall meeting at all, I am worried that he’s just too nice, and that he’s going to try to please everyone and be kind of wishy-washy. I would have loved to see him manage to sustain disgust at the abuses he was hearing about, but instead he sounded more concerned than angry, and I would put my money on angry any day. I want the CFPB to be led by a son-of-a-bitch that pisses people off and constantly tried to enlarge his jurisdiction rather than keeping well inside the lines. Time will tell.
It’s all mom’s fault
Maybe it’s because I grew up with an unapologetic working mother, but I am confused and enraged by all the cultural norms concerning mothers and how everything is their fault.
When I grew up in the 1970’s I had all sorts of role models of mothering. I was lucky to live next door to Sally, I met MA (Mary Ann) in puberty, and of course there was my own mom. All of these women were fiercely devoted to their choices: Sally and MA stayed home with their young kids but as their kids grew up, devoted more and more time to other things. My mom was a computer science professor my entire life. It goes without saying (but just for the record I’ll say it here) that I support people doing what they want to and need to for their own private reasons, no questions asked.
Sure, there were differences in interactions between my mom and these other surrogate moms. My mom didn’t have a lot of extra time to shop or cook, for example. But on the other hand she was a great role model for me in showing me how to be happy with what you do and have kids at the same time. And some things she didn’t have time for I was lucky enough to get from other things and people.
Here it is, thirty years later, and lots things have changed for working mothers. Some things have gotten easier: there’s online shopping, so I can provide my three sons with clothes and food without leaving home, which was a major struggle for my mom. Some things have gotten harder: school and daycare has gotten more expensive (more on that below). Other things haven’t changed so much, which itself is strange.
Here’s an article that got me pissed off enough to write this post. It’s a New York Times piece about an Olympic swimmer who, after taking time off and having two children, has returned to swimming and is actually competitive at the age of 40. I am so completely impressed by her, but for some reason the Times sees it as appropriate to deliver the following lines:
Evans said she had been criticized on social networking sites for training when she should be home with her children. But she has set up her schedule so her main swimming workout takes place in the morning, from 5:30 to 7:30, so she can make it home in time for breakfast. Her crazy hours are not lost on her daughter, who recently asked, “Why do you swim in the dark, Mommy?”
…
Willson’s job in technology sales allows him to work from home. He can chip in with the children when needed and behold the force of nature that is his wife.
First of all, how is it appropriate to mention idiots on Facebook? It is so entirely defensive and out of place. If I’m training for the Olympics, probably for the very last time in my life, my kids will be psyched for me to do my best, even if it means missing breakfast sometimes. And why is there always a mention of the martyred husband? Just imagine this was a male swimmer coming back to the Olympics after not swimming for 15 years, do we hear about his wife? No we don’t. Ridiculous, and the New York Times should do better. If they mention idiots on Facebook, they should also mention how they are idiots.
Here’s another story that got me incredibly pissed (if you were looking for a happy post this morning, I apologize). It’s about a public ad campaign in Georgia with billboard pictures of fat kids looking unhappy. This is insane and insulting on so many levels I don’t really know where to start, but let me start with the intended target: the mom. Yes, it’s mom’s fault that there are fat kids, and these billboards are telling mom not to let their kids get fat.
As an aside, it’s also now officially okay to blame mom for making her kids fat, as it’s also officially okay to blame the kids themselves. It’s government-sponsored bullying. Never mind the fact that they’ve shown nutrition education and exercise doesn’t actually cause people to lose weight (i.e. understanding where calories are hidden in food doesn’t magically make them leave cheeseburgers). Never mind that nobody has come up with a viable plan for how to address this issue. Let’s blame moms anyway, because then we are taking this issue seriously.
It makes you wonder why women want to become moms at all considering all the things we are signing up for. Oh and wait, actually lots of women aren’t having kids, but interestingly a recent paper came out showing women who are highly educated are having more kids. Here’s the abstract for that paper:
Conventional wisdom suggests that in developed countries income and fertility are negatively correlated. We present new evidence that between 2001 and 2009 the cross-sectional relationship between fertility and women’s education in the U.S. is U-shaped. At the same time, average hours worked increase monotonically with women’s education. This pattern is true for all women and mothers to newborns regardless of marital status. In this paper, we advance the marketization hypothesis for explaining the positive correlation between fertility and female labor supply along the educational gradient. In our model, raising children and home-making require parents’ time, which could be substituted by services bought in the market such as baby-sitting and housekeeping. Highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, which enables them to have more children and work longer hours. Finally, we use our model to shed light on differences between the U.S. and Western Europe in fertility and women’s time allocated to labor supply and home production. We argue that higher inequality in the U.S. lowers the cost of baby-sitting and housekeeping services and enables U.S. women to have more children, spend less time on home production and work more than their European counterparts.
Also interesting is this interview, where they describe the results of another paper which tracked women vs. men in various fields of science, including math. It looks like evidence for my post about meritocracy and horizon bias, i.e. the idea that women self-select out of certain fields because they are just not very appealing. From the interview:
The women who come in to academic science careers tend to be so highly motivated that they stay. They limit the number of children they have. Other studies have shown that female academics have fewer children than other professional women, such as lawyers. Female graduates see women scientists working very hard in what they feel are less fair conditions, and it puts them off. Societal factors also make it harder for women to have such demanding careers–women tend to manage family problems, for example.
By the way, I am not insufferably sad about mothers and their fates. I make fun of mothers too, and this article about passive parents is one I could have written. From the article:
But seriously, what is the deal with asking our children to behave? “Maybe you should get down?” What the hell is wrong with you lady? She’s four. There’s no room for negotiating here. I’m all for giving my kids choices to make them feel like they’re in control of something, blah, blah, blah, but this is not the time. “Maybe” should be reserved for times like: “Do you want to wear a dress today or MAYBE a skirt?”
I could go on and on about the passivity of modern yuppie parents, and I’d be right (hey I live in the Upper West Side so you know I’d be right). But if you think about it for a minute, this is just another manifestation of the same thing: it’s all mom’s fault. These women are performing a mother role instead mothering from the stomach, and it’s because they are made insecure by all the incredible bullshit out there about how to be a good mom and what other people are going to think if they scream at their kid in public or if their kid starts to scream. We have taught our mothers to be insecure, and to feel at fault, and oh yes, to be the target of bullying ad campaigns as well.
People, let’s get it together and solve problems instead of pointing fingers. I’m looking at you, Santorum.
How Harvard is failing its students
In a recent Bloomberg article, Ezra Klein argues that Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues are failing their students because the students end up confused about what they can do with themselves after college and end up going to Wall Street firms as a way of making themselves marketable. From the article:
For many kids, college represents an end goal. Once you get into a good college, you’ve made it, and everyone stops worrying about you. You’re encouraged to take classes in subjects like English literature and history and political science, all of which are fine and interesting, but none of which leave you with marketable skills. After a few years of study, you suddenly find it’s late in your junior year, or early in your senior year, and you have no skills pointing to the obvious next step.
What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.
He then talks about how the investment banks makes the application process formal, which is something that these kids are good at, and also that Wall Street promises to build them into people with careers and options. He also points out that some kids go into other formal applicationed jobs like Teach for America, so it’s not all about the money, at least not for all of them, and he concludes by saying how Harvard should change:
My hunch is that we have underemphasized the need to learn skills, rather than simply learn, while in college. The fact that Teach for America — which pays almost nothing and can place its hires far from cosmopolitan hot spots — is one of the few recruiting systems competitive with Wall Street suggests that graduates are open to paths that aren’t remotely as remunerative as finance and aren’t based in New York or San Francisco. They’re just not seeing all that many of them.
Although I agree with some of his diagnosis, I don’t agree with his solution of learning more “skills” in college.
As an aside, as I learned from Karen Ho’s excellent book about investment banking, Liquidated, and also from people I’ve met, the skills you learn on Wall Street as freshmen analysts are primarily bullshitting skills and Excel skills. These most definitely should not be taught at college.
I think he is right about these kids being comfortable with the “formal process” of applying to investment banks etc., but I don’t think he dives deep enough into why this is true. The fact is, the kids who get into Harvard nowadays are, generally speaking, professional test takers. They are moreover dependent on outside metrics for evaluating themselves. If you took away tests and grading systems, these kids would be desperately unhappy, because that’s how they’ve been trained all their lives to think about their self-worth.
When I was a tutor at one of the undergrad houses at grad school, I was incredibly impressed with the international group of undergrads I was in charge of; their credentials, even at the age of 20, were amazing, and their knowledge and self-possession were stunning. Same with the high school kids I taught at math camp last summer. But one thing I saw time and time again was how much they needed to please some outside authority. It’s like they never decided whether they themselves liked their major or whether it was a good fit- it was instead about whether they’d be successful and whether it would be an impressive path for them. So, external metrics of success.
Here’s my diagnosis. These kids are vulnerable to Wall Street investment firms and to things like Teach for America because they have application processes at all. But life, normal adult life, doesn’t have an application process. You actually, at some point, need to figure out what you want to do and what makes you happy. You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place.
Actually you don’t ever have to decide that, you could just keep doing what you think looks good to other people and pleases your parents or friends, without regard to whether it fulfills you at all. That’s kind of what’s happening I think with the 36% of the Princeton undergrads going to finance.
As for what Harvard et al can do about this, I would suggest trying to send the message in one of their core curriculum classes, that it’s not only about what you’re good at, it’s also about what makes you happy. I’m not sure those kids have ever really been told that. Being told that might not make a huge difference, but it’s a good start.
And instead of teaching them new “skills,” they should be told about options outside of school, and meet people who are employed doing interesting things with their liberal arts education. Have them talk about the way they made their way there, forged a path, and felt insecure about doing something weird but did it anyway. In other words, present them with role models who are living out their lives on their own terms, with independent thoughts.
The future of academic publishing
I’ve been talking a lot to mathematicians in the past few days about the future of mathematics publishing (partly because I gave a talk about Math in Business out at Northwestern).
It’s an exciting time, mathematicians seem really fed up with a particularly obnoxious Dutch publisher called Elsevier (tag line: “we charge this much because we can”), and a bunch of people have been boycotting them, both for submissions (they refuse to submit papers to the journals Elsevier publishes) and for editing (they resign as editors or refuse offers). One such mathematician is my friend Jordan, for example.
Here’s a page that simply collects information about the boycott. As you can see by looking at it, there’s an absolutely exploding amount of conversation around this topic, and rightly so: the publishing system in academic math is ancient and completely outdated. For one thing, nobody I’ve talked to actually reads journals anymore, they all read preprints from arXiv, and so the only purpose publishers provide right now is a referee system, but then again the mathematicians themselves do the refereeing. So publishers are more like the organizers of refereeing than anything else.
What’s next? Some people are really excited to start something completely new (I talked about this a bit already here and here) but others just want the same referee system done without all the money going to publishers. I think it would be a great start, but who would do the organizing and get to choose the referees etc? It’s both lots of work and potentially lots of bias in an already opaque system. Maybe it’s time for some crowd-sourcing in reviewing? That’s also work to set up and could potentially be gamed (if you send all your friends online to review your newest paper for example).
We clearly need to discuss.
For example, here’s a post (hat tip Roger Witte) about using arXiv.org as a collector of papers and putting a referee system on top of it, which would be called arXiv-review.org. There’s an infant google+ discussion group about what that referee system would look like.
Update: here’s another discussion taking place.
Are there other online discussions going on? Please comment if so, I’d like to know about them. I’m looking forward to what happens next!
As predicted: watered down insider trading bill
Yesterday I posted about the insider trading bill which, in addition to making it illegal for politicians to trade on their insider knowledge, was also going to force “political intelligence firms” to register as lobbyists. Note that this is simply a form of transparency- they, people who work mostly for hedge funds and private equity, didn’t have to stop getting insider information, they’d just need to admit that they were getting it. But I guess that’s TMI from their perspective. From the Wall Street Journal article:
Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, plans to bring his version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or Stock Act, to the floor of the GOP-controlled chamber on Thursday, using a procedure that will prevent lawmakers from voting on major amendments. It is expected to pass by a wide margin.
…
At issue are changes Mr. Cantor made shortly before midnight Tuesday, when he unveiled his amendment to a bill that sailed through the Senate last week.
Most notably, Mr. Cantor cut a provision that would require people who mine Washington for market-moving information to disclose their activities in the same fashion as lobbyists. The provision covering what is known as the political-intelligence industry was opposed by Wall Street and its Washington lobbyists, including the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), which mounted an effort to kill it.
Just to be clear on who is writing legislation nowadays: they are called SIFMA, and they represent the players in the financial industry. You may remember them from this post, where they hired the research firm Oliver Wyman to investigate the impact of the Volcker Rule for a congressional hearing. Shockingly, that research firm thought the Volcker Rule should be watered down.
What exactly is the argument this guy Cantor is using to defend this change? I’d love to hear him come out and say, “I did it because SIFMA told me to”. How come we don’t get to see that argument made and defended? No wonder people don’t like or trust Congress. Even so I’ll give the last word to one of their members:
The House Democrat who has pushed for the legislation for the past six years—Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.)—opposed the GOP-backed changes.
Ms. Slaughter said in a statement that the Cantor-backed version of the insider-trading bill was crafted “in secret, behind closed doors, brokering deals for special interests.” She added: “How ironic—insiders now appear to be writing a bill meant to ban insider trading.”
Politicians and insider trading
There’s shit going down in Washington now around the proposed ban on insider trading of politicians (which for some weird reason up til now hasn’t been illegal). According to this New York Times article, the proposed legislation would also require certain “political intelligence firms” to register as lobbyists, and that gotten them up in a huff. From the article:
“Hedge funds, private equity funds and investment advisers — many of which are not currently registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act — might now be required either to register or to alter their business practices to avoid the need for registration,” the bulletin said. “If, for example, a hedge fund calls a Congressional committee staffer to gather information about the status of a bill that relates to the fund’s investment decisions, the fund may need to register.”
If you can judge someone by their enemies, then this bill seems kind of like my new best friend. Let’s wait to see how much it’s watered down in the next few days:
House Republicans and their floor leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, said they would amend the bill, going to the House floor this week, to strengthen it.
But Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, said, “I think ‘strengthening’ here is a euphemism for ‘weakening.’”
Preggers
The below video resonates with me, but trust me when I say it’s all about the hormones, and we do get over it, at least after weaning. In any case, I apologize (hat tip Jordan Ellenberg).
While I’m here, though, I would like to say one thing that non-pregnant people do to pregnant people, which is desex them. The maternity clothes industry was part of this until recently, making all maternity dresses (and they were all dresses) look like school-girl uniforms.
It’s like, now that you’re pregnant I’m going to treat you like an innocent child who’s never had a dirty thought in her life. But, people, how do you think we got this way?
But it’s a more general phenomenon, and you kind of act like an idiot in part because people treat you like one.
Raise capital gains and stop flying
There are two totally unrelated stories I want to discuss this morning, I hope you’ll forgive me.
First, take a look at this post, written by David Brin, which argues for higher capital gains tax. He points out VC’s or angel investors, in combination with entrepreneurs, are the true “job creators”, and also invest their money in a truly risky way, whereas generic rich people who only invest in established companies are taking risks but not on the same level. Yet these two classes of people are taxed at the same rate. I guess the counterarguments would be that they, the VC’s, also get more payoff (when things work out) and that they couldn’t make their investments without the fleet of passive rich people ready to invest if and when the company succeeds. Even so I think there’s a real difference.
It reminds me that, when I worked at D.E. Shaw and Lehman fell, there were lots of discussions around the water cooler about what the reaction would be by policy makers and regulators. The consensus fear was that the capital gains tax rate for hedge fund workers would be removed within weeks, if not days. Note this tax loophole allows hedge fund quants and traders to pay less taxes on their take-home pay than bankers across the street doing the same job. I don’t really know anyone who defends it, not even people who benefit from it. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Update: mostly people below the MD (managing director) level at hedge funds actually don’t get this benefit. It primarily applies to “buy and hold” people like VC’s, private equity, and long term debt firms.
Another argument I enjoy from Brin’s post is the refutation of lowering taxes in general to entice investment by rich people. As he said:
Supply Side assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it! Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person. Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction. Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer. Naturally, you invest it. Whatever the tax rates, you invest it, seeking maximum return.
This is absolutely true, and one of the funny things about (many of) the rich quants I know: they are obsessed with growing their pile, to the point of focusing more on money now that they’re rich than they ever did when they were poor physics or math graduate students. To be fair, to make the whole argument for raising taxes you’d need to consider the global response, whereby rich people essentially arb the tax systems of the various countries in search of the maximum return. Even so, I’m pretty sure the answer is not to try to compete with Caribbean island nations on how low we can tax.
Second, check out this fantastic article from the Wall Street Journal about how people respond to environmental impact issues by consuming more. In the article they describe what’s called the “Prius Fallacy: a belief that switching to an ostensibly more benign form of consumption turns consumption itself into a boon for the environment”. I love it, first of all because it’s completely snarky and second of all because it’s really true and annoying. My favorite line:
Even if you think that climate change is a left-wing crock, this ought to be a matter of gnawing concern. Global energy use is growing faster than population. It’s expected to double by midcentury, and most of the growth will be in fossil fuels. Disasters like the BP oil spill attract world-wide attention, but the main environmental, economic and geopolitical challenge with petroleum isn’t the oil that goes into the ocean; it is the oil we continue to use exactly as we intend.
By the way, I don’t claim to be particularly low-impact on the world myself: I’m flying to Amsterdam in March with my entire family, which definitely puts me on the earth’s shit list (turns out it’s all about airplane travel). For that matter I work at a company that makes it easier for consumers to buy airplane tickets. But at least I don’t pretend that buying a Prius or replacing my kitchen counters with less eco-unfriendly material makes me a good person (by the way, once you’ve got eco-unfriendly kitchen counters the damage is done. The best thing you can do for the environment at that point is never ever remodel your kitchen again. Can you handle that?!).
If I had my way, we’d know the fossil-fuel impact of every activity we engage in, and we’d be able to put ourselves on a fossil-fuel diet. Those people who carefully recycle their milk containers and buy local but also fly to East Asia every chance they get would be in for some major belt-tightening.
Let them game the model
One of the most common reasons I hear for not letting a model be more transparent is that, if they did that, then people would game the model. I’d like to argue that that’s exactly what they should do, and it’s not a valid argument against transparency.
Take as an example the Value-added model for teachers. I don’t think there’s any excuse for this model to be opaque: it is widely used (all of New York City public middle and high schools for example), the scores are important to teachers, especially when they are up for tenure, and the community responds to the corresponding scores for the schools by taking their kids out or putting their kids into those schools. There’s lots at stake.
Why would you not want this to be transparent? Don’t we usually like to know how to evaluate our performance on the job? I’d like to know it if being 4 minutes late to work was a big deal, or if I need to stay late on Tuesdays in order to be perceived as working hard. In other words, given that it’s high stakes it’s only fair to let people know how they are being measured and, thus, how to “improve” with respect to that measurement.
Instead of calling it “gaming the model”, we should see it as improving our scores, which, if it’s a good model, should mean being better teachers (or whatever you’re testing). If you tell me that when someone games the model, they aren’t actually becoming a better teacher, then I’d say that means your model needs to improve, not the teacher. Moreover, if that’s true, then without transparency or with transparency, in either case, you’re admitting that the model doesn’t measure the right thing. At least when it’s transparent the problems are more obvious and the modelers have more motivation to make the model measure the right thing.
Another example: credit scoring. Why are these models closed? They affect everyone all the time. How is Visa or Mastercard winning if they don’t tell us what we need to do to earn a good credit card interest rate? What’s the worst thing that could happen, that we are told explicitly that we need to pay our bills on time? I don’t see it. Unless the models are using something devious, like people’s race or gender, in which case I’d understand why they’d want to hide that model. I suspect they aren’t, because that would be too obvious, but I also suspect they might be using other kinds of inputs (like zip codes) that are correlated to race and/ or gender. That’s the kind of thing that argues for transparency, not against it. When a model is as important as credit scores are, I don’t see an argument for opacity.
Does hip-hop still exist?
I love music. I work in an open office, one big room with 45 people, which makes it pretty loud sometimes, so it’s convenient to be able to put headphones on and listen to music when I need to focus. But the truth it I’d probably be doing it anyway.
I’m serious about music too, I subscribe to Pandora as well as Spotify, because I’ll get a new band recommendation from Pandora and then I want to check their entire oeuvre on Spotify. My latest obsession: Muse, especially this song. Muse is like the new Queen. Pandora knew I’d like Muse because my favorite band is Bright Eyes, which makes me pathetically emo, but I also like the Beatles and Elliott Smith, or whatever. I don’t know exactly how the model works, but the point is they’ve pegged me and good.
In fact it’s amazing how much great music and other stuff I’ve been learning about through the recommendation models coming out of things like Pandora and Netflix; those models really work. My life has definitely changed since they came into existence. I’m much more comfortable and entertained.
But here’s the thing, I’ve lost something too.
My oldest friend sent me some mixed CDs for Christmas. I listened to them at work one recent morning, and although I like a few songs, many of the them were downright jarring. I mean, so syncopated! So raw and violent! What the hell is this?! It was hip-hop, I think, although that was a word from some far-away time and place. Does hip-hop still exist?
I’ve become my own little island of smug musical taste. When is the last time I listened to the radio and learned about a new kind of music? It just doesn’t happen. Why would I listen to the radio when there’s wifi and I can stream my own?
It made me think about the history of shared music. Once upon a time, we had no electricity and we had to make our own music. There were traveling bands of musicians (my great-grandmother was a traveling piano player and my great-grandfather was the banjo player in that troupe) that brought the hit tunes to the little towns eager for the newest sounds. Then when we got around to inventing the radio and record players, boundaries were obliterated and the world was opened up. This sharing got accelerated as the technology grew, to the point now that anyone with access to a browser can hear any kind of music they’d like.
But now this other effect has taken hold, and our universes, our personal universes, are again contracting. We are creating boundaries again, each around ourselves and with the help of the models, and we’ve even figured out how to drown out the background music in Starbucks when we pick up our lattes (we just listen to our ipods while in line).
I’d love to think that this contracting universe issue is restricted to music and maybe movies, but it’s really not. Our entire online environment and identity, and to be sure our actual environment and identity is increasingly online, is informed and created by the models that exist inside Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Google has just changed its privacy policy so that it can and will use all the information it has gleaned from your gmail account when you do a google search, for example. To avoid this, simply clear your cookies and don’t ever log in to your gmail account. In other words, there’s no avoiding this.
Keep in mind, as well, that there’s really one and only one goal of all of this, namely money. We are being shown things to make us comfortable so we will buy things. We aren’t being shown what we should see, at any level or by any definition, but rather what will flatter us sufficiently to consume. Our modeled world is the new opium.
Brainstorming with narcissists
In the most recent New Yorker, there’s an article which basically says that, although “no-judgment” brainstorming sounds great, it doesn’t actually produce better ideas. That in fact you need to be able to criticize each other’s half-baked plans to get real innovation.
The idea that a bunch of people, who have been instructed that no idea is too banal to speak out loud will eventually move beyond the obvious into creative territory is certainly attractive, mostly because it’s so hopeful: in this world everyone can participate in innovation. And in fact it may be true, that everyone can be creative, but I agree that it won’t generally happen in the standard brainstorming meeting.
As usual I have lots of opinions about this, and lots of experience, so I’ll just go ahead and say what I think.
When does working in a group work?
- When people are sufficiently technical for the discussion, although not completely informed: it’s helpful to have someone with great technical skills or domain knowledge but who hasn’t thought through the issue, so they can question all of the assumptions as they come up to speed. In my experience this is when some of the best ideas happen.
- When people are more interested in getting to the answer than in impressing the people around them. This sounds too obvious to mention, but as we will see below it’s actually almost impossible to achieve in a largish group at an ambitious or successful company.
- When people know the people around them will be able to follow somewhat vague arguments and help them make those arguments precise.
- Alternatively when people know that others will gladly find flaws in ideas that are essentially bullshit. When everyone has agreed to call each other’s bullshit in a supportive way, and has taken on that role aggressively, you have a good dynamic.
Why does the “no-judgment” rule fail?
- When you aren’t being critical, you never get to the reasons why things are obviously a bad idea, so you never get to a new idea. That’s the critical part of no-judgment brainstorming that fails, the friction supplied by the other people who call you on a bad idea. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of people talking in a room, distracting you from thinking well by the loudness of their voices.
- When you have a bunch of successful people who have never failed, nobody actually lowers their guard. This idea of the super-achieving educational 1% is described in this recent New York Times article. I’ve seen this phenomenon close-up many times. People who are academic superstars absolutely hate taking risks and hate being wrong: life is a competition and they need to win every time. (update: there are plenty of people who were really freaking good at school that aren’t like this; when I say “academic superstars” I want to incorporate the idea that these people identify their success in school and/or other arenas that have metrics of success, like contests or high-quality brands (Harvard, McKinsey, etc.), as part of their identity.)
- Finally, the setup of the brainstorm is necessarily shallow and doesn’t require follow-through. In my experience only germs of good ideas can possibly occur in meetings. Lots of good germs have been left to rot on whiteboards. It would be wicked useful to try to rank ideas at the end of a meeting (by a show of hands, for example), but the “no-judgment” rule also prevents this.
Asian educational systems often get criticized for being so non-individualistic that they repress originality. True. But a system where the individual is promoted as special in every way also represses originality, because narcissists brook no argument.
This recent “Room for Debate” discussion in the New York Times brings up this issue beautifully. The idea is that schools are more and more being seen as companies, where the students and parents (especially the parents) are seen as the customer. The customer is always right, of course, and the schools are expected to tailor themselves to please everyone. It’s the opposite of learning how to disagree, learning how to be a member of society, and learning how to be wrong.
Interestingly, some of the best experiences I’ve had recently in the successful brainstorming arena have come from the #OWS Alternative Banking group I help organize. It’s made up of a bunch of citizens, many of whom are experts, but not all, and many of whom are experts in different corners of finance. The fact that people come to a meeting to talk policy and finance on Sunday afternoons means they are obviously interested, and the fact that no two people seem to agree on anything completely makes for feisty and productive debates.
How’s it going with the Volcker Rule?
Glad you asked.
Recall that Occupy the SEC is currently drafting a letter of public comment of the Volcker Rule for the SEC (for background on the Volcker Rule itself, see my previous post). I was invited to join them on a call with the SEC last week and I will talk further about that below, but first I want to give you more recent news.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism wrote this post a couple of days ago talking about a House Financial Services Committee meeting, which happened Wednesday. Specifically, the House Financial Services Committee was considering a study done by Oliver Wyman which warned of reduced liquidity if the Volcker Rule goes into effect. Just to be clear, Oliver Wyman was paid by a collection of financial institutions (SIFMA) who would suffer under the Volcker Rule to study whether the Volcker Rule is a good idea. In her post, Yves was discussed the meeting as well as Occupy the SEC’s letter to that Committee which refuted the findings of Oliver Wyman’s study.
Simon Johnson, who was somehow on the panel even though it was more or less stuffed with people who wouldn’t argue, had some things to say about how much it makes sense to listen to people who are paid to write studies in his New York Times column published yesterday. He also made lots of good arguments against the content of the study, namely about the assumptions going into it and how reasonable they are. From Simon’s article:
Specifically, the study assumes that every dollar disallowed in pure proprietary trading by banks will necessarily disappear from the market. But if money can still be made (without subsidies), the same trading should continue in another form. For example, the bank could spin off the trading activity and associated capital at a fair market price.
Alternatively, the relevant trader – with valuable skills and experience – could raise outside capital and continue doing an equivalent version of his or her job. These traders would, of course, bear more of their own downside risks.
If it turns out that the previous form or extent of trading existed only because of the implicit government subsidies, then we should not mourn its end.
The Oliver Wyman study further assumes that the sensitivity of bond spreads to liquidity will be as it was in the depth of the financial crisis, 2007-9. This is ironic, given that the financial crisis severely disrupted liquidity and credit availability more generally – in fact this is a major implication of the Dick-Nelson, Feldhutter and Lando paper.
If Oliver Wyman had used instead the pre-crisis period estimates from the authors, covering the period 2004-7, even giving their own methods the implied effects would be one-fifth to one-twentieth of the size (this adjustment is based on my discussions with Professor Feldhutter).
CSPAN taped the meeting, which was pretty long, but I’d suggest you watch minutes 50 through 57, where Congressman Keith Ellison took some of the panel to task for being, or acting, super dumb.
For whatever reason, Occupy the SEC wasn’t invited to the panel. You can read their letter that argues against Wyman’s study, which is on Yves’s post, or you can read this comment that one of the members of Occupy the SEC posted on Johnson’s NYTimes piece (“OW” refers to Oliver Wyman, the author of the paid study):
Your testimony at the hearings yesterday was a refreshing counterpoint to the other members of the panel.
On top of the flaws in the OW analysis you covered in the article, there was another misleading point that the OW report purported to prove.
The study focused on liquidity for corporate bonds, which SIFMA/OW characterized as ‘financing american businesses’ . But a quick review of the outstanding corporate bonds in the study reveals that the lions share of corporate bonds are CMOs and ABS. Additionally, the study reports that the majority of the holdings of corporate bonds are in the hands of the finance industry.
As a result the loss of liquidity anticipated by the SIFMA folks will mostly impact them, not the pensioners and soldiers (and their Congressmen) the bankers were trying to scare with the OW loss estimates.
If the banks are forced to withdraw as market makers for this debt, replacement market makers won’t enter until these bonds trade at much lower levels. These losses are currently stranded (and disguised) in the banking system, and by extension are inflating the value of the funds invested in these bonds.
It’s critical that the market making rules are clarified to ensure that liquidity provision for these instruments is driven out of the protected banks and into a transparent market where the mispricing will be corrected and the losses will be properly recognized.
So just to summarize, the Congressional committee listened to the results of a paid study talking about how bad the Volcker Rule would be for the market, when in fact it would be good for the market to be uninsured and realistic.
I’m not a huge fan of the Volcker Rule as it is written, but these are really terrible reasons to argue against it. To my mind, the real problem is that, as written, the Volcker Rule is too easy to game and has too many exceptions written into it.
Going back to the call with the SEC (and with Occupy the SEC). I haven’t kept abreast of the details of the Volcker Rule like these guys (they are super relentless), but I did have some questions about the risk part. Namely, were they going to end up referring to an already existing risk regulatory scheme like Basel or Basel II, or were they creating something separate altogether? They were creating something separate. They mentioned that they weren’t interested in risk per se but only to the extent that wildly fluctuating risk numbers expose proprietary trading, which is the big no-no under the Volcker Rule.
But here’s the thing, I explained, the risk numbers you are asking for are so vague that it’s super easy, if I’m a bank, to game this to make my risk numbers look calm. You don’t specify the lookback period, you don’t specify the kind of Value-at-Risk, and you don’t compare my risk model worked out on a benchmark portfolio so you really don’t know what it’s saying. Their response was: oh, yeah, um, if you could give us better wording for that section that would be great.
So to re-summarize, we have “experts”, being paid by the banks, who explain to Congress why we shouldn’t let the Volcker Rule go through, and in the meantime we’ve assigned the SEC the job of writing that rule even though they don’t know how to game a risk model (there’s a good example here of JP Morgan doing just that last week).
One last issue: when we asked about why repos had been exempted sometime in between the writing of the statute and the design of the implementation, the SEC people just told us we’d “have to ask the Fed that”.
Followup: Change academic publishing
I really appreciate the amazing and immediate feedback I got from my post yesterday about changing the system of academic publishing. Let me gather the things I’ve learned or thought about in response:
First, I learned that mathoverflow is competitive and you “do well” on it if you’re quick and clever. Actually I didn’t know this, and since it is online I naively assumed people read it when they had time and so the answers to questions kind of drifted in over time. I kind of hate competitive math, and yes I wouldn’t like that to be the single metric deciding my tenure or job.
Next, ArXiv already existed when I left math, but I don’t think it’s all that good a “solution” either, because it’s treated mostly as a warehouse for papers, and there is not much feedback (although I’ve heard there’s way more in physics). Correct me if I’m wrong here.
I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, because the above two things really do function and add a lot to the community. I’m just pointing out that they aren’t perfect.
We, the mathematics community, should formally set out to be creative and thoughtful about different ways to collaborate and to document collaboration, and to score it for depth as well as helpfulness, etc. Let’s keep inventing stuff until we have a system which is respected and useful. The reason people may not be putting time into this right now is that they won’t be rewarded for it, but I say do it anyway and worry about that later. Let’s start brainstorming about what that system would look like.
That gets to another crucial point, which is that the people we have to convince are really not each other so much as deans and provosts of universities who are super conservative and want to be absolutely sure that the people they award tenure to are contributing citizens and will be for 40 years. We need to convince them to reconsider their definitions of “mathematical contributions”. How are we going to do this?
My first guess is that deans and provosts would listen to “experts in the field” quite a bit. This is good news, because it means that in some sense we just need to wait until the experts in the field come from the generation of people who invented (or at least appreciate) these tools. There are probably other issues though, which I don’t know about. I’d love to get comments from a dean or a provost on this one.
Change academic publishing
My last number theory paper just came out. I received it last week, so that makes it about 5 years since I submitted it – I know this since I haven’t even done number theory for 5 years. Actually I had already submitted it to a journal, and they took more than a year to reject it, so it’s been at least 6 years since I finished writing it.
One of the reasons I left academics was the painfully slow pace of being published, plus the feeling I got that, even when my papers did come out, nobody read them. I felt that way because I never read any papers, or at least I rarely read the new papers out of the new journals. I did read some older papers, ones that were recommended to me.
In other words I’m a pretty impatient person and the pace was killing me.
And I went to plenty of talks, but that process is of course very selective, and I would mostly be at a conference, or inside my own department. It led me to feel like I was mathematically isolated in my field as well as being incredibly impatient.
Plus, when you find yourself building a reputation more through giving talks and face-to-face interactions, you realize that much of that reputation is based on how you look and how well you give talks, and it stops seeming like mathematics is a just society, where everyone is judged based on their theorems. In fact it doesn’t feel like that at all.
I was really happy to see this article in the New York Times yesterday about how scientists are starting to collaborate online. This has got to be the future as far as I’m concerned. For example, the article mentions mathoverflow.net, which is a super awesome site where mathematicians pose and answer questions, and get brownie points if their answers are consistently good.
It’s funny how nowadays, to get tenure, you need to have a long list of publications, but brownie points for answering lots of questions on a community website for mathematicians doesn’t buy you anything. It’s totally ass backwards in terms of what we should actually be encouraging for a young mathematician. We should be hoping that young person is engaged in doing and explaining mathematics clearly, for its own sake. I can’t think of a better way of judging such a thing than mathoverflow.net points.
Maybe we also need to see that they can do original work. Why does it have to go through a 5 year process and be printed on paper? Why can’t we do it online and have other people read and rate (and correct) current research?
I know that people would respond that this would make lots of crappy papers seem on equal par with good, well thought-out papers, but I disagree. I think, first of all, that crap would be identified and buried, and that people would be more willing to referee online, since on the one hand it wouldn’t be resented, free work for publishers, and on the other hand, people would get more immediate and direct feedback and that would be cool and it would inspire people to work at it.
In other words, we can’t compare it to an ideal world where everyone’s papers are perfectly judged (not happening now) and where the good and important papers are widely read. We need to compare it to what we have now, which is highly dysfunctional.
That begs another huge question, which is why papers at all? Why not just contributions to projects that can be done online? For example my husband has an online open source project called the stacks project, but he feels like he can’t really urge anyone, especially if they’re young, to help out on it, because any work they do wouldn’t be recognized by their department. This is in spite of the fact that there’s already a system in place to describe who did what and who contributed what, and there are logs for corrections etc.; in other words, there’s a perfectly good way of seeing how much a given mathematician contributed to the project.
I honestly don’t see why we can’t, as a culture, acclimate to the computer age and start awarding tenure, or jobs, to people who have made major contributions to mathematics, rather than narrowly fulfilled some publisher’s fantasy. I also wonder if, when it finally happens, it will be a more enticing job prospect for smart but impatient people like myself who thrive on feedback. Probably so.
See also the follow-up post to this one.
Happy Birthday, Betty White!
Betty White turns 90 today (although Obama doesn’t seem to completely believe it).
I love her, and want to be just like her when I grow up. If you don’t know why, check her out describing Sarah Palin as a crazy bitch a couple of years ago, a brilliant combination of humor, politics, and sexual freedom.
mathbabe 