How do we encourage empathy?
Usually I spend a lot of time reading stuff, and then I get outraged or otherwise respond internally to something I read. I take notes on the article, in an email to myself, and that later becomes a blog post.
But since all I’ve been doing lately is hanging out with the family, cooking, and watching Psych and Star Wars: Enterprise marathons, I have less to react to and therefore less to write about.
[Aside: if you haven’t seen Psych yet, please take a look, especially if you like hilarious and snarky references to the 1980’s, but even if you don’t. Season 4 episode 1 is a great starting point. Netflixxable.]
Even so, here we are, friend, and I wanted to write this morning, and you’re here already.
So I will share some thoughts I had when I took a brisk walk last night, to try to get rid of the big Christmas dinner feeling. Big dinner, not big feeling, although the feeling was pretty big too.
I was thinking about gratitude, for even having the opportunity to have such a nice meal to share with my family, and then I started thinking about what I consider the flip side of gratitude, namely empathy. I was wondering, how do we encourage empathy and gratitude in ourselves and in others? In, say, our children?
First, who cares?
Lots of people have been writing about empathy lately, how rich people have less empathy, and the failure of technical fields to encourage empathy. We also seem to have connected gratitude with happiness.
Personally I’m pretty convinced these are both critical feelings both for relating to others on an individual basis and on thinking about public policy and income inequality, which I think about quite a bit. So I’m game.
Second, why those two things?
It occurred to me as I was walking that maybe other people don’t think of gratitude and empathy together. But for me there’s a pretty straight line from empathy to gratitude, and it’s not all that easy to get to gratitude some other way.
Some people write about how to raise your kids to be grateful, for example, and they often suggest that we ask our kids to think of things for which they are grateful, say before bed every night.
This strikes me as hollow. I don’t think people can just conjure up gratitude. Instead they will learn to list things which they are lucky to have, but being fortunate is not the same as feeling grateful. And listing a bunch of things you are fortunate to have can backfire, I’d imagine. I’m not into this plan.
But maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I misunderstood the plan. Readers, is there a connection for you too between empathy and gratitude, and is there a way to engender gratitude directly?
So, what about empathy?
Do you remember how much you hated your father growing up? I do. And I also remember the time, or times, that I realized I had the same tendencies inside myself. I could be just like that guy, I realized. FUCK.
And that’s when I realized I had a choice. I could either hate myself as much as I hated him, or I could forgive both of us. Or actually there are more options, including things like continuing to hate him and ignoring those same qualities in myself, but I try not to be too hypocritical.
Anyhoo, the point is that I forgave both of us. I empathized with his weaknesses, which were mine as well. And that is how I empathize with people in general, because I realize I am one mistake away from fucking up, or having too much debt, or being homeless or jobless.
And by the way, I even have made those mistakes, or many of them anyway, but I’ve been bailed out because of friends, or because I’m educated, or because I’m white. I am largely insulated from my bigger mistakes, but when I see someone in pain, it’s my pain, because it could be me.
And of course we have empathy for people because they are unlucky, like if someone they love gets sick, or if they themselves get sick and this ridiculous health system lands them in deep debt, or if they are at the wrong place at the wrong time, like if someone gets into an accident or if they are born into poverty.
But we also have empathy in recognition of making super shitty decisions and even of being cruel. Because cruelty is a weakness of ours too.
For me at least, gratitude comes right after that. It’s actually just a continuation of the feeling of empathy. I am grateful to my friends, and I am grateful for my freedom, and I am grateful I have not been in a situation recently where I’ve been overly tempted to wield my personal arsenal of evil weapons.
So, how do we encourage empathy and/or gratitude?
That’s the thing, I don’t know. The truth is, I’m not sure how it can be done without going through this whole process of hating something, then recognizing it inside yourself, and then coming to terms with it kindly. That’s pretty much all I got.
And so instead of asking my kids to be grateful, I just try to do my best to role model empathy and gratitude myself, in my words and actions and especially in my inactions.
What does a really efficient market look like?
The raison d’être of hedge funds is to make the markets efficient. Or at least that’s one of the raisons d’être, the others being 1) to get rich and 2) to leave early on Fridays in the summer (resp. winter) to get a jump on traffic to the Hamptons (resp. ski area, possibly in Kashmir).
And although having efficient markets sounds like a great thing, it makes sense to ask what that would look like from the perspective of a non-insider.
This recent Wall Street Journal article on high-tech snooping does a pretty good job setting the tone here. First, the kind of thing they’re doing:
Genscape is at the vanguard of a growing industry that employs sophisticated surveillance and data-crunching technology to supply traders with nonpublic information about topics including oil supplies, electric-power production, retail traffic and crop yields.
Next, who they’re doing it for:
The techniques, which are perfectly legal, represent the latest advance in the longtime Wall Street practice of searching for every possible trading advantage. But the high cost of much of the new information—Genscape’s oil-supply report costs $90,000 a year—means that some forms of trading are becoming even more the province of firms with substantial resources.
Let’s put these two things together from the perspective of the public. The market is getting information from hidden cameras and sensors, and all that information is being fed to “the market” via proprietary hedge funds via channels we will never tap into. The end result is that the prices of commodities are being adjusted to real-world events more and more quickly, but these are events that are not truly known to the real world.
[Aside: I’m going to try to avoid talking about the “true price” of things like gas, because I think that’s pretty much a fool’s errand. In any case, let me just say that, in addition to the potentially realtime sensor information that goes into a commodity’s price, we also have people trading on it because they are adjusting their exposure to some other historically correlated or anti-correlated instrument, or because they’ve decided to liquidate their books, or because they’ve decided the Fed has changed its macroeconomic policy, or because Spain needs to deal with its bank problems, or because someone wants to take money out of the market to rent their summer house in the Hamptons. In other words, I’m not ready to argue that we’re getting close to the “true price” of gas here. It’s just tradable information like any other.]
I am now prepared, as you hopefully are as well, to question what good this all does for people like us, who are not privy to the kind of expensive information required to make these trades. From our perspective, nothing happens, the price fluctuates, and the market is deemed efficient. Is this actually an improvement over the alternative version where something happens, and then the price adjusts? It’s an expensive arms race, taking up vast resources, where things have only become more opaque.
How vast are those resources? Having worked in finance, I know the answer is a shit-ton, if it is profitable in a short-term edgy kind of way. Just as those guys dug a hole through mountains to make the connection between New York to Chicago a few nanoseconds faster, they will go to any length to get the newest info on the market, as long as it is deemed to have a profitable edge in some time frame – i.e. the amount of time it will take a flood of competitors to do the same thing.
Just as there’s a kind of false myth that most of the web is porn, I’d like to perpetuate a new somewhat false myth that most data gathering and mining happens for the benefit of trading. And if that’s false now, let’s talk about it again in 100 years, when the market for celebrities is mature, and you can make money shorting a bad marriage.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Aunt Pythia had a late start today, because for some reason knowing she has two weeks of staying at home with the kids made her want to doze a bit longer.
But Aunt Pythia has not forgotten you! And she’s here to give you some pretty great questions and what she thinks are pretty great answers! She hopes you agree! And remember, as you enjoy today’s column:
please, think of something to ask Aunt Pythia at the bottom of the page!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’ve managed to achieve a modicum of notoriety in my career, which means I sometimes get interviewed. And in those interviews, I sometimes get asked questions which people who meet me in other professional and even most personal contexts don’t ask me, like, “Were you ever married” (“No”). “Were you ever asked/Did you ever think about it” (“No”).
Now the convention is for single women to at least profess an interest in being married, and not doing so reveals you to be seriously maladjusted. But honest answers to this line of questioning (or the related one, “Do you regret not having children?”) would reveal me to have seriously deviant attitudes and have the potential to undermine my hard-won professional credibility.
I regard this type of questioning as inappropriate, but somehow interviewers think it’s OK to probe the personal lives of women the way they never would men. Do you have any suggestions as to how to politely tell them this is off limits?
Nina from Argentina
Dear Nina,
By some amazing coincidence – or possibly not – this question came up recently in a Bloomberg article about Swedish CEO and “Banker of the Year” Annika Falkengren. In her case it was questions about what kind of mom she could possibly be considering her very busy job. From the article:
Gender bias is still a hurdle for women trying to reach the top, Falkengren said. Her own encounters with sexism came from unexpected places: When she became CEO with a baby at home, she said, reporters repeatedly asked how often she took her daughter to daycare and how much time she had for traditional mothering.
When Lars Nyberg, the former CEO of phone company TeliaSonera AB “had two kids below the age of 2, he was never asked that question,” Falkengren said. “I was still getting that question when my daughter was 8.” Former Volvo AB CEO Leif Johansson “was running Volvo with five kids, and he never got the question.”
Next, I wanted to mention this BBC article which describes how the new German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen was hyper-sexualized, depicted as a Lara Croft-type character on a German TV station.
Finally, take a look at this Wall Street Journal article on the reactions men have to the presence of women. Turns out when they are in a war-mongering environment they get more so, and when they’re in a peace-loving environment they perform exaggerated good deeds. And women, in the presence of men, don’t change their behavior.
My conclusions from the above as well as my personal experience in a “man’s world”:
- Some men are deeply threatened by women and want to put them into one of two boxes: sex object or mother.
- If you are neither it makes them very confused. They want that confusion to be your problem, not theirs.
- In general people want to make it your problem to explain your deviance from “normal”.
- In general it’s the people who deviate from normal that make life worth living. Abnormal people should be celebrated, not reprimanded.
In terms of advice for you, I’d try to turn it back on them (“them” refers to anyone asking you this kind of thing, not just journalists). This can be done with various levels of aggression and activism. If you’re really annoyed, ask the interviewer how often they’ve asked a male scientist that question. And then wait for an answer. If you’re feeling less aggressive, mention that many mathematicians you know don’t get married. In other words, make it deliberately ungendered. Also consider asking why they chose that question for you. Make them aware of how inappropriate it is.
In general, though, keep in mind that you don’t have to be polite with journalists. They have super thick skins. And don’t forget the magic phrase, “this is off the record”. It’s totally fine to respond with, “this is off the record, but your question is totally inappropriate and I won’t agree to finish this interview until you agree to remove it from this interview.” You can be sure that they’ve heard worse.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m a CS Babe that tends to end up involved with men who are also into some kind of technical nerdery. While they know how to stimulate me intellectually, they tend to lack expertise physically. I like to think of myself as having a healthy and full social life, and that’s involved a pretty good amount of sex with a number of different partners and situations.
Most of the men I end up with, however, have a lot less experience than me. I think they’ve mostly watched a lot of porn, and while they probably recognize that real life sex isn’t like that, they still have that as kind of a baseline model for a sexual encounter. They want to give me a satisfying experience, but that can be hard to do. Eventually, the fact that I’m not getting off eclipses any amount of interest I have in a guy. I’ve tried dating men where our physical compatibility outweighs our capability for interesting conversation, but that ends in frustration too.
I don’t mind helping them out and trying to teach them what I want, but I’m looking for an equal partner when it comes to sex, not a pupil. Do you have recommendations to help me get what I want from less-experienced partners without feeling like I’m TA-ing Orgasms 101? Any ideas of how to seek out and identify people that I can click on multiple levels with- or should I just find someone I like intellectually and invest my time into developing his sex skills?
Thanks,
Sex Life: Unending Training
Dear SLUT,
I’m going to go with the latter. Find an awesome guy and teach him how to pleasure you. Do it super deliberately and honestly, and really really often, and within about two weeks you will be getting seriously good sex if the guy is a diligent student. Who knows, you might be with that guy for a long time, and it’ll be worth the investment. In any case you’ll be improving the world for other future nerd girls.
The key point here is, if you’re going to be a TA, then you might as well make that explicit. Don’t pretend, ever, to enjoy something that isn’t actually good. Bad sexual habits can be learned within nanoseconds when it comes to inexperienced and insecure men. And then, once learned, they are much harder to break, because it immediately becomes a matter of ego. This requires you being super encouraging with all the requisite grunts and groans, so get used to doing that.
And if you want to go easy on the guy in becoming his sex teacher, then tell him you’ve got a special kind of clitoris, or something, and make it seem totally OK that he doesn’t know how to deal with this special thing. And then tell him exactly what to do.
Also, don’t forget to tell him how to talk dirty. I’m sure there must be some kind of online resource you can find that will give him advice on this front. In fact, after googling for one second I found a billion places he could go.
One last thing. It’s not clear that any man actually knows what they’re doing, so count your blessings that you get to start from scratch and get it right. It actually might be worse to start with someone who is 80% good and who thinks they don’t need any tutoring (but if you do find yourself in that situation, don’t forget the “special clitoris” approach).
Good luck, and may all of your students be bright!
Auntie P
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Dearest Aunt Pythia,
I am studying algebra, specifically algebraic number theory, and my friends try really hard to be supportive of my work. But our conversations always go something like this:
Friend: What are you working on now?
Me: Investigating abelian extensions in generalized Dedekind domains (or whatever other really nerdy part of algebra I’m thinking about that day).
Friend: Is that more algebra?
Me: Yeah.
Friend: Didn’t I take algebra in like, 9th grade?
I understand my work is not very accessible to most non-math people, but do you have suggestions for fun/creative ways of describing abstract algebra versus high school “algebra”?
Friendly Algebraist Nerd (of you!)
Dear FAN,
Just say, yes, it’s the same field. But whereas in high school we learn how to think about abstracting away numbers to become variables, in my field we build up interesting structures with sets of abstract variables and see what kind of patterns we can detect. For example, we all know about addition on integers or real numbers, but it turns out that you can create sets of abstract things that have an “addition law”. They’re called “groups” and sometimes the sets are finite, like with clock arithmetic, and sometimes they pop out of nowhere, like the points on an elliptic curve. Oh and by the way, you can think of an elliptic curve topologically as a donut with sprinkles, and you’ve chosen one of those sprinkles as the “0” of the addition law.
Anyway, if you start with something like that you might end up with a new algebra fan. Or at least someone who kind of gets how algebra is both like high school algebra and much much cooler.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Citigroup is the real reason we need the Volcker Rule
This is a guest post by Tom Adams, who spent over 20 years in the securitization business and now works as an attorney and consultant and expert witness on MBS, CDO and securitization related issues. Jointly posted with Naked Capitalism.
Volcker Rule
Last week, the rules for the Volcker Rule – that provision of the Dodd-Frank Legislation that was intended to prevent (reduce?) proprietary trading by banks – were finalized. As a consequence, there has been a lot of chatter among financial types around the internet about what the rule does and doesn’t do and how it is good or bad, etc. Much of the conversation falls into the category of noise and distraction about unintended consequences, impacts on liquidity and broad views of regulatory effectiveness.
Citigroup
I call it noise, because in my view the real purpose of the Volcker Rule is to prevent another Citigroup bailout and therefore the measure of its effectiveness is whether the rule would accomplish this.
As you may recall, Citigroup required the largest bailout in government history in 2008, going back to the government well for more bailout funds several times. The source of Citigroup’s pain was almost entirely due to its massive investment in the ABS CDO machine. Of course, at the time of Citi’s bailout, there was a lot of noise about the potential financial system collapse and the risk posed by numerous other banks and institutions, so Citi as the main target of the TARP bailout, and ABS CDOs as the main cause of Citi’s pain, often gets lost in the folds of history.
The CDO market
In the years leading up to the financial crisis, Citi was an active underwriter for CDO’s backed by mortgage backed securities. Selling these securities was a lucrative business for Citi and other banks – far more lucrative than the selling of the underlying MBS. The hard part of selling was finding someone to take the highest risk piece (called the equity) of the CDO, but that problem got solved when Magnetar and other hedge funds came along with their ingenious shorting scheme.
The next hardest part was finding someone to take the risk of the very large senior class of the CDO, often known as the super-senior class (it was so named because it was enhanced at levels above that needed for a AAA rating).
For a time, Citi relied on a few overseas buyers and some insurance companies – like AIG and monoline bond insurers – to take on that risk. In addition, the MBS market became heavily reliant upon CDOs to buy up the lower rated bonds from MBS securitizations.
As the frenzy of MBS selling escalated, though, the number of parties willing to take on the super-seniors was unable to match the volume of CDOs being created (AIG, for instance, pulled back from insuring the bonds in 2006). Undeterred, Citi began to take down the super-senior bonds from the deals they were selling and holding them as “investments” which required very little capital because they were AAA.
This approach enabled Citi to continue the vey lucrative business of selling CDOs (to themselves!), which also enhanced their ability to create and sell MBS (to their CDOs), which enabled Citi to keep the music playing and the dance going, to paraphrase their then CEO Chuck Prince.
The CDO music stopped in July, 2007 with the rating agency downgrades of hundreds of the MBS bonds underlying the CDOs that had been created over the prior 24 months. MBS and CDO issuance effectively shut down the following month and remained shut throughout the crisis. The value of CDOs almost immediately began to plummet, leading to large mark-to-market losses for the parties that insured CDOs, such as Ambac and MBIA.
Citi managed to ignore the full extent of the declines in the value of the CDOs for nearly a year, until AIG ran into its troubles (itself a result of the mark-to-market declines in the values of its CDOs). When, in the fall of 2008, Citi finally fessed up to the problems it was facing, it turned out it was holding super-senior CDOs with a face value of about $150 billion which were now worth substantially less.
How much less? The market opinion at the time was probably around 10-20 cents on the dollar. Some of that value recovered in the last two years, but the bonds were considered fairly worthless for several years. Citi’s difficulty in determining exactly how little the CDOs were worth and how many they held was the primary reason for the repeated requests for additional bailout money.
Citi’s bailout is everyone’s bailout
The Citi bailout was a huge embarrassment for the company and the regulators that oversaw the company (including the Federal Reserve) for failing to prevent such a massive aid package. Some effort was made, at the time TARP money was distributed, to obscure Citi’s central role in the need for TARP and the panic the potential for a Citi failure was causing in the market and at the Treasury Department (see for example this story and the SIGTARP report). By any decent measure, Citi should have been broken up after this fiasco, but at least some effort should be made from a large bank ever needing such a bailout again, right?
Volcker’s Rule is Citi’s rule
So the test for whether the Volcker Rule is effective is fairly simple: will it prevent Citi, or some other large institution, from getting in this situation again? The rule is relatively complex and armies of lawyers are dissecting it for ways to arbitrage its words as we speak.
However, some evidence has emerged that the Volcker Rule would be effective in preventing another Citi fiasco. While the bulk of the rules don’t become effective until 2015, banks are required to move all “covered assets” from held to maturity to held for sale, which requires them to move the assets to a fair market valuation from… whatever they were using before.
Just this week, for example, Zions Bank announced that they were taking a substantial impairment because of that rule and moving a big chunk of CDOs (trust preferred securities, or TRUPS, were the underlying asset, although the determination would apparently apply to all CDOs) to fair market accounting from… whatever valuation they were using previously (not fair market?).
Here’s the key point. Had Citi been forced to do this as they acquired their CDOs, there is a decent chance they would have run into CDO capacity problems much sooner – they may not have been able to rely on the AAA ratings, they might have had to sell off some of the bonds before the market imploded, and they might have had to justify their valuations with actual data rather than self-serving models.
As a secondary consequence, they probably would have had to stop buying and originating mortgage loans and buying and selling MBS, because they wouldn’t have been able to help create CDOs to dump them into.
Given the size of Citi’s CDO portfolio, and the leverage that those CDOs had as it relates to underlying mortgage loans (one $1 billion CDO was backed by MBS from about $10 billion mortgages, $150 billion of CDOs would have been backed by MBS from about $1.5 trillion of mortgage loans, theoretically), if Citi had slowed their buying of CDOs, it might have had a substantial cooling effect on the mortgage market before the crisis hit.
Insulin level tracking?
I’m wondering something kind of stupid this morning, which is why we don’t track people’s insulin levels. Or maybe we do and I don’t know about it? In which case, how do I get myself a Quantified Self insulin tracker?
Here’s a bit of background to explain why I’m asking this. Insulin levels in your blood regulate the speed at which sugar in your blood is turned into fat, and similarly they regulate how quickly fat cells release fat into the bloodstream.
If someone without diabetes eats something sweet their insulin levels shoot up to collect all the blood so the blood sugar levels doesn’t get toxic. Because what’s really important, as diabetics know, is that blood sugar levels remain not too high nor too low. Type I diabetics don’t make insulin, and Type II diabetics don’t respond to insulin properly.
OK so here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure my insulin levels are normally a bit high, and that when I eat sugar or bread they spike up dramatically. And although that might sound like the opposite of diabetes, it’s actually the precursor to diabetes, where my body goes nuts making insulin and then my organs become resistant to it.
But first of all, I’d like to know if I’m right – are my insulin levels elevated? – and second of all, I’d like to know how much my body reacts, insulin-wise, to eating and drinking various things. For instance, I drink a lot of coffee, and I’d like to know what that does to my insulin levels. And what about Coke Zero?
I am probably going to be disappointed here. I know that the critical level to keep track of for diabetics, blood sugar, is still pretty hard to do, although recent continuous monitors do exist and are helping. So if anyone knows of a “continuous insulin monitor” please tell me!
One last word about why insulin. I am fairly convinced that the insulin levels – combined with a measure of their insulin resistance – would explain a lot about why certain people retain fat where others don’t with the same diet. And it would be such a relief to stop arguing about willpower and start understanding this stuff scientifically.
One last thing. Please do not comment below telling me how to lose weight or talking about how to have more willpower: I will delete such comments! Please do comment on the scientific issues around the mechanisms of insulin, data collection, and potentially modeling with that data.
Maybe I have an Irish mind
I’m only a quarter Irish but something about the way Conan O’Brien (love that guy!) describes “the Irish mind” in this 2012 speech to the University Philosophical Society at Trinity College Dublin makes me want to claim a full Irish heritage.
According to O’Brien, Irish minds cause people never follow rules, and not because they’re brave but because they are just not wired to do so. I can definitely relate to that. Hearing rules listed has always made me want to immediately rebel. Just a reaction I have.
Also, there’s the storytelling aspect to my personality, which I definitely inherited from my dad (who’s fully half Irish).
According to this personality trait, if you’ve had an experience, it doesn’t really count until you’ve told the story to a friend, or maybe 6 close friends, and then it doesn’t really get good until you’ve embellished it and generally perfected the story. Many of my actual experiences have been enhanced and even gone from pleasant to unpleasant (or vice versa) through this process.
And I’ve also done lots of crazy things just in anticipation of telling the story later. It’s a constant little Irish voice in my head urging me on with things like, “think of how awesome this story is gonna be!” and “especially after you embellish it!” I pretty much listen to that voice every time.
It’s not always pleasant having an Irish mind, especially for the people around me. My husband, who is Dutch, is much more literal and unembellished than I am. It took me about 15 years of our marriage to train him out of correcting me when I’d say something like “We waited in that line for 4 and a half hours!” and he’d say, “Actually it was more like 15 minutes.”
People, does that help the story? I think not. Therefore we do not do that.
Someday I gotta go back to the mother country and get really into the foggy alcoholic brew of it all. And I’m sure that those guys won’t mind me claiming my heritage once they see how I can knit a faux-traditional Irish fisherman sweater and play Irish jigs (really slowly) on my fiddle. I’ll come back with some incredible stories, I just know it.
Do we really want elite youth to get more elite?
I don’t know if you guys read this recent New York Times editorial entitled Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up: In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves.
In it, they claim there’s some kind of crisis going on in this country for smart kids (defined as good test-takers). Mostly their evidence for this is that, among other countries, our super good test takers aren’t as prevalent as in other countries. Turns out we’re in the middle of the pack in terms of super scorers. From the article:
On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did.
Why is this a problem? As far as I can see they’ve come up with two reasons.
First, it’s “bad for American competitiveness,” whatever that means. Last time I checked we were still pretty dominant in various ways in terms of technology and science, and there are still plenty of very well-educated young people trying desperately to get visas to enter or stay in this country.
As an aside: it’s a super interesting question to think about how we, as a country, are increasingly ignorant about how our technology works, because so much technical knowledge has been off-shored. But that’s not the crisis these guys are addressing.
Second, it’s bad for the smart kids in this country, because “when the brightest students are not challenged academically, they lose steam and check out.”
I’ll pause in my summary of their article to make the following point. If that’s true, if bright kids who aren’t academically challenged at school start checking out more and more, then it makes just as much sense to me to see if there’s something they can check out towards.
In other words, what else is there for bright teenagers to do besides school? I’ll speak as a former bright teenager. When I lost interest in school, I got a lot of odd jobs in town cleaning houses and raking lawns, and then I used the money to buy lots of softcover books from a local bookstore. I don’t know why I didn’t just take them out of the library, where I also worked. It just didn’t seem as cool as owning my very own Brother Karamazov.
I learned a lot with my odd jobs in high school, which included being a part-time secretary, a barista, a math tutor, and working on a truck at the New England Produce Center. In fact I learned way more about how the world worked than I would have if I’d followed the advice of this editorial, which was to take lots more AP classes and then enter college when I was 14.
My theory is that, instead of obsessing over math scores in standardized tests, we concentrate on allowing our children to enrich their lives with adventures and experiences that they come up with and that are reasonably safe. So let’s start by encouraging widespread internships for younger kids, and not just minimum wage jobs at fast food joints. And not just for super test-takers either. Enrichment happens when kids learn about stuff that’s outside their usual rhythm and when there are no adults scripting their activities and telling them what to do or how many laps to swim.
Notice my emphasis on letting kids choose stuff. What drives me nuts just as much as the idea of further separating and isolating and venerating great test-takers, which as far as I’m concerned is the opposite way you should treat future successful people, is the idea that there should be such a well-defined funnel for children at all.
Yes, kids should all go to school and learn basic things. But the idea that, just because someone’s good at tests they should be treated as if they’re already running the Fed only increases the weird worshippy aspect of how our culture treats math nerds.
Plus, it’s a bizarre time to come up with this idea, considering how many online and live resources there are for nerd kids now compared to when I was a kid. If I’m a nerd teenager now, I can find plenty of ways to share nerdy questions and learn nerdy things online if I decide not to work in a coffee shop.
Finally, let me just take one last swipe at this idea from the perspective of “it’s meritocratic therefore it’s ok”. It’s just plain untrue that test-taking actually exposes talent. It’s well established that you can get better at these tests through practice, and that richer kids practice more. So the idea that we’re going to establish a level playing field and find minority kids to elevate this way is rubbish. If we do end up focusing more on the high end of test-takers, it will be completely dominated by the usual suspects.
In other words, this is a plan to make elite youth even more elite. And I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that’s not going to help our country overall.
Aunt Pythia’s advice, flannel version
Aunt Pythia aint gonna lie, she’s all about flannel this week. Right now she’s wearing flannel pajamas and snuggled underneath a flannel sheet. She’s looking forward to taking a warm bath and then getting into flannel lined pants and a flannel shirt, also lined.
[Aside: it’s all about the lining.]
It’s been a particularly good year in flannel fashion, just in case you’re wondering. And, the clothes horse that Aunt Pythia is, she’s been sampling the various wares.
Conclusion: LLBean knows from comfy warmth.
Now that we’ve addressed the theme of the day, it’s time for some serious advice distribution. And remember, as you enjoy today’s column:
please, think of something flannelly to ask Aunt Pythia at the bottom of the page!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I have two (much) younger brothers, aged 4 and 5. Can you recommend any books/youtube videos/games I can read/play/do with them to help them learn about and enjoy math?
Rapt in Flatland
Dear RiF,
I really think that age range is too young to explicitly learn math from a book. But it’s not too young to have discussions (it’s incredibly important to make this an interactive Socratic dialog, not a monologue from an adult!) about, say,
- the number line (where’s 0? What’s on the other side of 0?)
- why the earth spins
- what the solar system looks like (talking first without pictures or models)
- why the moon looks different on different days
If that all seems cool, you can move on to
- why there are seasons
- why daylight is shorter in the winter
- what really defines a “pattern”
In other words, super concrete things that require mind-expanding 3-dimensional visualizations and/or questioning of basic assumptions and definitions. You’d be surprised how many weeks these conversations can last with a 4- or 5-year old.
Also, please keep in mind that jigsaw puzzles, while not strictly logical exercises, are super awesome. And the Tower of Hanoi puzzle is super mathematical as well, the solution being a coded way to count in binary.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
p.s. Just gave my yearly contribution to wikipedia. Love that site.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My girlfriend has a genuinely very complicated family life, and, though she definitely loves me, has much much less time to be with me than I would like. I do love her, but now I’m increasingly irritated at being alone so much even while I nominally have a girlfriend, and it’s affecting my feelings and even my desire for her. But this is absolutely not something we can discuss. She is doing her best and that’s it, and gets upset at any discussion, sometimes even hostile. It may end badly.
Suggestions?
Increasingly Irritated
Dear II,
Yes, I do have a suggestions. Discuss it with her. It’s the only way you’re going to get relief and get to a relationship that works for both of you.
I think it might help to ask her to make an appointment with you to discuss the arrangement between you two, and it might also help to imply that it’s very important to your future as a couple. Give her some time to prepare for this discussion but not an arbitrary amount of time.
To be super explicit, here are some phrases you might want to use. “I’d really like to sit down with you and discuss our relationship and its future. It would be great to have a discussion in the next two weeks. Here are some times that work for me, and where we have as much time as we need to finish the first part of the conversation, which I know will be difficult for both of us.”
That way you’re both respectfully demanding a discussion and giving her the emotional credit that it’s going to be tough on her.
A bit more advice: don’t conflate why it’s difficult with your request for a discussion. Then she’ll ignore the request and focus on how difficult it is for her.
Now, you didn’t ask this, and I don’t know much about your situation, but can we spend just a moment wondering what’s really going on here? I don’t want to sound negative, but whatever it is that’s going on, she’s not spending much time with you and is not even really willing to explain why. Those two things in combination make me want to advise you to just break up with her now, and forget the discussion.
In fact, in breaking up with her, you might get a discussion for free, if she really wants to keep you. And if she doesn’t, you should be the hell out of there anyway and with someone who’s making time to be with you.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
As 50 approaches and work opportunities seem to be disappearing, do you really think it is possible to reinvent yourself and move into a different field?
I have applied my expertise in various quantitative and analytical fields to move from number cruncher (and forecasting) to more policy-based analysis roles. Is management the only answer? Every other role seems to be eaten by the progression of technology into various fields.
Grumpy Old Dude
Dear GOD,
My guess is that your salary and experience has made the lower-level analyst jobs both unappealing and out of reach for you. If you’re going to cost that much, the reasoning goes, you need to be doing more. Thus management.
Can I just make one argument in favor of management? If someone with your experience is in charge of telling people with very little or no experience how to do number crunching and analysis well, then things would be much more efficient. In an ideal world, that would be your role as manager – doling out sage advice to inexperienced analysts. So see if that makes sense and excites you.
But, to answer your question, it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. Some of my favorite people did so when they were 75.
Good luck!
Auntie P
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’m a Libertarian. I find it pretty much impossible to have an intelligent discussion with liberals about anything even remotely related to politics. The same is not true with conservatives, even though I disagree with them just as much. Consequently I just don’t participate in such conversations. Unfortunately I both love a good debate and live in a very liberal state, so this has lead me to feel somewhat isolated and starved for good conversation.
I’ve talked to other libertarian minded people and they’ve had similar experiences. Conservatives can be infuriating in some of their beliefs, but at least you can reason with them on most issues. With liberals it’s impossible, unless you already pretty much agree and are just quibbling over details.
You’re about as liberal as people come. Do you have any advice on how one could have a civil discussion with a liberal on issues where you have relatively fundamental disagreements?
Lonely Libertarian
Dear LL,
Yes. Discuss what your commonalities are first, and move cautiously and carefully outwards from there. Suggestions here include: Too Big to Fail banks are not OK, Google and the NSA stealing our private data is not OK, and other currently shitty things about the world.
Next, before going to the inevitable argument about how to fix these problems, talk about exactly why these things are not OK. Then start talking about the concept of fixing them – what characteristics would a solution enjoy? What is not acceptable, and why?
That should take enough time to get through lunch.
Good luck! And don’t forget, liberals make great lovers! They’re really into massages.
Auntie P
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
So, after all the turkey and pie and so forth, was the ratio of time spent agonising in the kitchen to time spent going ‘Yay, Thanksgiving’ a good one? And how would you determine a metric for Thanksgiving enjoyment?
(Asking in contemplation of what’s likely to happen at Christmas…)
Strange Oblivious Briton
Dear SOB,
I could totally tell you were British from your weird spelling of “agonizing!”.
For me, Thanksgiving was a success if 1) the turkey didn’t make anyone sick and 2) nobody threw plates frisbee-style at each others’ heads in the heat of an argument.
A particularly good sign is when people are still willing to hug each other when they finally leave the building, assuming anyone’s actually still there at all and hasn’t stormed off in a huff.
Haha just kidding, kind of. The truth is these big meals are just so so difficult, I honestly think you should keep standards as low as possible and be pleasantly surprised at every moment of happiness.
And whatever you do, stop agonizing in the kitchen, nobody will appreciate your effort anyway!! Just throw a bird into the oven and come back 6 hours later, seriously.
Merry Christmas,
Aunt Pythia
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
International trade agreements and big money bullying #OWS
The New York Times just put out an amazing and outrageous story, entitled Tobacco Industry Tactics Limit Poorer Nations’ Smoking Laws and written by Sabrina Tavernise.
In it she describes the bullying tactics of tobacco companies to small countries over their internal health regulations aiming to protect their citizenry from cancer. From the article:
In Africa, at least four countries — Namibia, Gabon, Togo and Uganda — have received warnings from the tobacco industry that their laws run afoul of international treaties, said Patricia Lambert, director of the international legal consortium at the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.
“They’re trying to intimidate everybody,” said Jonathan Liberman, director of the McCabe Center for Law and Cancer in Australia, which gives legal support to countries that have been challenged by tobacco companies. In Namibia, the tobacco industry has said that requiring large warning labels on cigarette packages violates its intellectual property rights and could fuel counterfeiting.
A few comments about this outrage, only tangentially mathematical:
- This happens because, in order to protect companies from being taken over by foreign nations, and in the name of free trade, it’s now possible for companies to sue countries directly. That’s what the tobacco industry is doing to small countries without the means to fight back.
- This is exactly the kind of thing that some people like Yves Smith have warned the TPP is going to do with financial regulation and other stuff. So imagine large companies or industries suing the United States or other nations for regulation that would “harm trade” or “violate their intellectual property rights.”
- In fact, it’s not going too far to say that the proliferation of these kinds of treaties are a serious threat to national sovereignty. Yves makes this case here.
- Think about it this way. It’s kind of a supernational Citizen’s United, in that only companies and industries that have enough lawyer power can get their way. And many companies easily have more resources than many countries. Think about Facebook and Google and their lobbying efforts on behalf of data privacy laws in Europe already. Now think how that battle might look when it’s against Namibia.
- Already, from the article, we saw that Uruguay was only able to fight back against Philip Morris because Bloomberg’s foundation helped them with the legal battle. And I’m glad Bloomberg helped, but if you count up all the money that will go to bullying and compare that to all the money available to help out the bullied, you quickly come to a sad conclusion.
- Once again, we have to remember that the TPP is being negotiated in secret, among a bunch of nations many of whom claim to be democratic.
Occupy the SEC shows us all how to occupy
Today is a remarkably cold day in New York but that’s done nothing to dampen the spirits of the members and supporters of Occupy the SEC, which had a real influence on the final Volcker Rule, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, among others.
I’m not saying the Volcker Rule is perfect – in fact Occupy the SEC gave it a C- grade overall. And it was maddeningly delayed. As I’ve mentioned before, Occupy the SEC sued the regulators for the delay, or tried to, but the judge found that they had no standing.
Even so, there’s a clear victory here for Occupy the SEC. The final rule, or at least its preamble, references Occupy the SEC’s public commenting letter 284 times. The rule could have been way worse, and probably would have been without OSEC’s contribution.
Just to get some idea of the other voices in this debate – i.e. the lobbyists – take a look at this graphic on access to the rule-writers by parties interested in influencing the final rule:
I remember those guys in the early days of Occupy, meeting in the cold, drafty, and noisy chambers of 60 Wall Street after work and sitting in a circle going through the proposed Volcker Rule line by line. Nothing could have been more workmanline or hopeful. It was a great example of an Occupy group that was all work and no talk. People who wanted to talk just left them alone. I talked to them briefly about some risk model details for the rules because of my background in portfolio risk.
I even remember talking to them about the chances anybody would even read their letter, never mind take it seriously. They knew the rules, though, and the rules were that the regulators would have to read all the letters, although how seriously they took them was a different matter. They were doing it because they knew it was one of the best shots at having their voices heard. It was an incredible commitment to that ideal.
My conclusions:
- Those guys are awesome.
- Public commenting is a critical tool.
- This wouldn’t have worked without a receptive set of regulators.
- This is inspiring and will hopefully help my Occupy group, Alt Banking, plan our next project.
- I particularly like the idea of report cards, which Occupy has created for regulation.
Computer, do I really want to get married?
There’s a new breed of models out there nowadays that reads your face for subtle expressions of emotions, possibly stuff that normal humans cannot pick up on. You can read more about it here, but suffice it to say it’s a perfect target for computers – something that is free information, that can be trained over many many examples, and then deployed everywhere and anywhere, even without our knowledge since surveillance cameras are so ubiquitous.
Plus, there are new studies that show that, whether you’re aware of it or not, a certain “gut feeling”, which researchers can get at by asking a few questions, will expose whether your marriage is likely to work out.
Let’s put these two together. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to imagine that surveillance cameras strategically placed at an altar can now make predictions on the length and strength of a marriage.
Oh goodie!
I guess it brings up the following question: is there some information we are better off not knowing? I don’t think knowing my marriage is likely to be in trouble would help me keep the faith. And every marriage needs a good dose of faith.
I heard a radio show about Huntington’s disease. There’s no cure for it, but there is a simple genetic test to see if you’ve got it, and it usually starts in adulthood so there’s plenty of time for adults to see their parents degenerate and start to worry about themselves.
But here’s the thing, only 5% of people who have a 50% chance of having Huntington’s actually take that test. For them the value of not knowing that information is larger than knowing. Of course knowing you don’t have it is better still, but until that happens the ambiguity is preferable.
Maybe what’s critical is that there’s no cure. I mean, if there was therapy that would help Huntington’s disease sufferers delay it or ameliorate it, I think we’d see far more people taking that genetic marker test.
And similarly, if there were ways to save a marriage that is at risk, we might want to know on the altar what the prognosis is. Right?
I still don’t know. Somehow, when things get that personal and intimate, I’d rather be left alone, even if an algorithm could help me “optimize my love life”. But maybe that’s just me being old-fashioned, and maybe in 100 years people will treat their computers like love oracles.
Predictive risk models for prisoners with mental disorders
My friend Jordan Ellenberg sent me an article yesterday entitled Coin-flip judgement of psychopathic prisoners’ risk.
It was written by Seena Fazel, a researcher at the department of psychiatry at Oxford, and it concerns his research into the currently used predictive risk models for violence, repeat offense, and the like, which are supposedly tailored to people who have mental disorders like psychopathy.
Turns out there are a lot of these models, and they’re in use today in a bunch of countries. I did not know that. And they’re not just being used as extra, “good to know” information, but rather as a tool to assess important decisions for the prisoner. From the article:
Many US states use such tools to assess sexual offending risk and to help decide whether to exercise their powers to detain sexual offenders indefinitely after a prison term ends.
In England and Wales, these tools are part of the admission criteria for centres that treat people with dangerous and severe personality disorders. Outside North America, Europe and Australasia, similar approaches are increasingly popular, particularly in clinical settings, and there has been a steady growth of research from middle-income countries, such as China, documenting their use.
Also turns out, according to a meta-analysis done by Fazel, that these models don’t work very well, especially for the highest risk most violent population. And what’s super troubling is, as Fazel says, “In practice, the high false-positive rate probably means that some offenders spend longer in prison and secure hospital than their true risk would suggest.”
Talk about creepy.
This seems to be yet another example of a mathematical obfuscation and intimidation that gives people a false sense of having a good tool at hand. From the article:
Of course, sensible clinicians and judges take into account factors other than the findings of these instruments, but their misuse does complicate the picture. Some have argued that the veneer of scientific respectability surrounding such methods may lead to over-reliance on their findings, and that their complexity is difficult for the courts. Beyond concerns about public protection, liberty and costs of extended detention, there are worries that associated training and administration may divert resources from treatment.
The solution? Get people to acknowledge that the tools suck, and have a more transparent method of evaluating them. In this case, according to Fazel, it’s the researchers who are over-estimating the power of their models. But especially where it involves incarceration and the law, we have to maintain an adherence to a behavior-based methodology. It doesn’t make sense to put people in jail an extra 10 years because a crappy model said so.
This is a case, in my opinion, for an open model with a closed black box data set. The data itself is extremely sensitive and protected, but the model itself should be scrutinized.
What’s the best narrative for revolution?
Yesterday at our weekly Alt Banking meeting we had an extraordinary speaker, Merlyna Lim, come talk to us about social media and grass roots organizing.
Her story was interesting and nuanced; I won’t get everything down here. But there were quite a few sound byte takeaways I can express.
- The organizing which culminated in the Arab Spring started way before Facebook or Twitter came to the region.
- To a large extent social media has replaced chatting in the cafe, which we don’t do anymore.
- But that’s actually a good thing, since many regimes are so oppressive they won’t let large groups of people hold regular meetings (and large can mean 5 or more).
- Whereas social media is pretty good at energizing people to “get rid of their enemy” at a given critical moment, and mobilize on the street, it’s not that great at nuanced discussions for how to build something permanent and lasting afterwards.
One other thing I wanted to mention was Merlyna’s work on Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated after getting into a dispute with a police officer.
The original story that got people mobilized in Tunis and out on the street, was that the police officer was a woman, that she slapped him, and that he was a college educated street vendor. It turns out these were white lies – he never finished high school, the police officer may have been a man, and there was probably no slap – but they built a narrative that people really loved. Merlyna wrote a paper about this available here if you want to know more.
That brings us to the question of why this particular framing was so appealing. Merlyna put it this way: plenty of other people had self-immolated under similar circumstances in Tunisia in the past 6 months alone. But they didn’t start a revolution because they were just very poor and didn’t have this story with extra (made-up) humiliating details. Killing yourself because you are frustrated at not having enough to eat just isn’t as compelling.
It reminds me of this Bloomberg View piece I’ve been chewing on for a couple of week, written by Peter Turchin and entitled Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays. He studies conditions for revolution as well, and claims that having a large unemployed but highly educated population – the “lawyer glut” we’re seeing today – is asking for trouble. From his article:
Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.
Food for thought. Does one have more sympathy for people whose foodstamps have been recently cut or for someone who got a law degree and can’t find a job? Or is the real outrage when both happen (or at least are said to happen)? Personally, and this is maybe because I’ve been reading Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, I’m not as worried about the lawyer.
Aunt Pythia’s advice: sex at the end
You guys know Aunt Pythia loves you. And Aunt Pythia feels the love from you readers as well, especially in person (some of you are reticent to add comments online, for whatever reason).
So don’t take it the wrong way when I say this: you guys are nerds. I have like a 5-to-1 ratio of math-related versus sex-related questions, and today I’m effectively withholding the sex until the end as a hook to keep you guys.
Don’t get me wrong, I love nerd questions. Happy to answer them. But people! Let’s spice this up! And if you can’t go all the way to sex at least come up with something about breastfeeding in public or thereabouts. As you know, Aunt Pythia doesn’t make up questions – that would be beneath her – but she has no problem with prompts.
In other words, as you enjoy today’s column:
please, think of something sexy to ask Aunt Pythia at the bottom of the page!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Aunt Pythia,
What’s the deal with employers being dishonest in their job descriptions, and the general acceptance of this sort of unethical behavior? I work in a somewhat prestigious buy-side shop where I was told I’d be in a front-office quant research position. After I arrive, I find out that my responsibilities are really more like that of a middle-office tech position. Instead of doing research on market inefficiencies, I’m relegated to automating an endless number of reports. My employer knew what the job would entail before I joined and yet portrayed it to be something it’s not. Worst of all, it seems like 80% of the people I consult with say (expressly or implicitly) that I should be glad I got my foot in the door and that this stuff is very common, so it’s nothing to fret about. WTF’s wrong with people?
Perennial Employee
Dear PE,
For whatever reason, which I certainly don’t relate to, there are some people that still desperately want to work in finance as front-office quants. They want it so badly, in fact, that they’re willing to pretend to be doing that while they actually do other stuff. You seem to not be one of those people. Awesome.
My suggestion to you is to get another job, simple as that. You’re not going to change their mind about what your job should be, since they’re clearly perfectly comfortable with lying to people. I mean, once you’ve got another job lined up, there’s no harm in telling them you’re leaving unless you get moved to the position you were promised, but please don’t hold your breath for that to actually happen.
One last thing: look outside finance! There are plenty of other ways to be a nerd.
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
How does Mathbabe break down a data problem into manageable steps? I’m a mathematician who has tried a few data mining problems on the side for fun, and I get totally overwhelmed whenever I try to start. If I were solving a math problem, I’d read relevant papers to see what is known and get ideas for techniques, I’d break down my desired result into lemmas and work on them one by one, and I’d have a plan in mind throughout (it might change, of course, but I’d always know why I was doing what I was doing).
But if I’m trying to, say, classify a bunch of labeled feature vectors, I’m at a loss. I experiment and play around with the data, but I feel so random about everything. How do I choose how many hidden units to have in a neural net? How do I choose K in K-nearest neighbor classification? And so on. Some stuff works better than other stuff, but I don’t know how to be systematic. I end up getting discouraged, which is too bad because data problems are awesome and I want to master them.
Any tips for this mathematician on how to solve problems whose solutions aren’t proof-based?
Proof Machine
Dear PM,
Great question! And I’m glad you’re asking that. It’s a sign that you want to do things right, and know why you’ve made decisions. I want you to cultivate that desire.
First, (after separating my out-of-sample data from my in-sample data) I spend a lot of time with smallish samples getting the feel of things through “exploratory data analysis.” This helps make sure the data is clean, gives me the overall distribution and feel for the various data sources, and gives me some idea of the kind of relationships I might expect between the inputs and possibly the target, if there’s a well-defined target.
You’d be surprised how much you learn by doing that.
Next, how do you even choose which algorithm to use, never mind how exactly to tune the hyperparameters of a given algorithm? The answer is that it’s a craft, and over time you gain intuition, but at first you just don’t know and you experiment. Put the science in data science. Try a bunch of different ones and see which works better, and hypothesize on why, and try to test that hypothesis.
Here’s another possibility. Start with synthetic data that is “perfectly set up” for a given algorithm – figure out what that means – and then pretend you don’t know that, and see whether the above testing procedure would give you the correct result. Now add noise to that perfect data set, and see how quickly (i.e. with how much noise) your perfect solution doesn’t seem optimal anymore. That gives you an overall way of thinking about optimizing algorithms and hyperparameters. It’s hard, even with linear regression.
Oh, and buy my book. It should hopefully help.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
p.s. when I worked in math, I didn’t break things down into lemmas first. I first tried to answer the question, why is this true? (maybe by starting with small examples) and then only later, in order to explain it on paper, would I break things down into lemmas.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I have a tenure-track job in a “hard-core STEM field”; I’m also a very young looking woman. I have a serious and rewarding research program, I really enjoy teaching at the board, and I hear that I give great seminars.
Yet recently, for the first time, I have been overcome with extreme, physiological, panic when I stand at the front of a room to give a seminar. This is not because I’m worried about the material; I’m not. This is also not stage fright; I have iron nerves about performing.
It is a feeling of panic brought on by watching the room fill up with men, with maybe only 1 or 2 very junior women. I start thinking “what happened to all the other young women who, like me, loved mathematics? At what point were they all removed from the community? When will too much get to be too much for me too?”
This started happening about a year ago and it’s only getting worse. I’m not expecting to change all the weird experiences of being a young woman in my field; I just want to figure out how to deal with my own thoughts as I stand in front of my audience.
Feeling like a fox in a room full of hunting dogs
Dear fox,
This is going to sound trite, but here goes: you are not a statistic, you are an individual person. And although you are a woman person, that doesn’t mean you have to do stuff that other women have done. If things are working for you on a minute-to-minute basis, then that means you can be happy and proud of having set up your life to be fulfilled.
Nobody is asking you to explain why other people do the things they do. We can barely explain why we do the things we do – and then half the time the understanding only comes years later. Just focus on who you are, who you want to be and how you want to spend your time.
I’d also like to mention that, as a woman who left math, I also loved teaching and I loved giving seminars – that was the good stuff! For that matter there were lots of great things about being a professor. And I didn’t leave because I was a woman and felt like it was time to leave – nor did I not leave because I wanted to prove a point about women not leaving. I left because, in my individual life and with my individual goals, it was what I wanted.
So I guess I’m suggesting that you be a bit more self-centered and somewhat less identified with women, at least at those moments, if that is possible and if that helps. If that doesn’t help, consider going to a cognitive therapist who specializes in dealing with panic attacks. Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I feel an eerie compulsion to answer this email. I love the broken grammar and all. What should I do?
Hello,
How are you doing today? My name is Colvin Hostetter. I came across your e-mail under the Graduate Students portal while surfing online for tutorial for my daughter, Debra is a 18 years old girl. She is ready to learn. I would like the lessons to be at your location. Kindly let me know your policy with regard to the fees, cancellations, location and make-up lessons.
Also, get back to me with your area of SPECIALIZATION and any necessary information you think that might help.
The lessons can start by last week of November. Mind you, any break during Thanksgiving and Christmas would be observed respectively.
Looking forward reading from you.
My best regard,
Mr Colvin.
Professor Has Ignored Silly Ignoble New Game
Dear PHISING,
Really? PHISING? I think you really are a bit kinky in the grammar and spelling rules department.
So this must be a spam email, since it’s talking about an 18-year-old girl who is “ready to learn.” It sounds like soft porn. And it doesn’t describe what she needs to learn – math? physics? German? I’d be not at all surprised to hear someone describe the actual financial bamboozling mechanism that would transpire if you did answer this, although a quick Google search doesn’t uncover it.
My suggestion is to mark this, and any other similar emails, as “spam” so that Google will do the work for us in the future and delete this bullshit.
AP
——
Dear Auntie P,
My wife and I have not used any birth control other than rhythm and/or withdrawal for more than 16 years now (~mid late twenties to early mid forties.) We have not had any unwanted pregnancies through this. We did have one successfully planned pregnancy that corresponded exactly to the month she charted to pinpoint ovulation.
So, are we lucky outliers or is this a much more successful strategy than we were both led to believe in high school sex ed?
Any suggestions for here on out?
Thanks,
Lucky in love
Dear Lucky,
The reason that rhythm might not work is if women have irregular ovulations. If your wife doesn’t, though, then cool (although she may experience that as she approaches menopause).
The reason withdrawal doesn’t work is because men often forget the “withdrawal” part of the plan. I mean, it’s certainly possible to get pregnant with the pre-cum (just ask Alice) but super unlikely.
In other words, you are a special, special man with a very excellent memory.
Here on out: don’t forget to remember the plan! And be aware of irregular cycles!
Aunt Pythia
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
PDF Liberation Hackathon: January 17-19
This is a guest post by Marc Joffe, the principal consultant at Public Sector Credit Solutions, an organization that provides data and analysis related to sovereign and municipal securities. Previously, Joffe was a Senior Director at Moody’s Analytics.
As Cathy has argued, open source models can bring much needed transparency to scientific research, finance, education and other fields plagued by biased, self-serving analytics. Models often need large volumes of data, and if the model is to be run on an ongoing basis, regular data updates are required.
Unfortunately, many data sets are not ready to be loaded into your analytical tool of choice; they arrive in an unstructured form and must be organized into a consistent set of rows and columns. This cleaning process can be quite costly. Since open source modeling efforts are usually low dollar operations, the costs of data cleaning may prove to be prohibitive. Hence no open model – distortion and bias continue their reign.
Much data comes to us in the form of PDFs. Say, for example, you want to model student loan securitizations. You will be confronted with a large number of PDF servicing reports that look like this. A corporation or well funded research institution can purchase an expensive, enterprise-level ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tool to migrate data from the PDFs into a database. But this is not much help to insurgent modelers who want to produce open source work.
Data journalists face a similar challenge. They often need to extract bulk data from PDFs to support their reporting. Examples include IRS Form 990s filed by non-profits and budgets issued by governments at all levels.
The data journalism community has responded to this challenge by developing software to harvest usable information from PDFs. Examples include Tabula, a tool written by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow Manuel Aristarán, extracts data from PDF tables in a form that can be readily imported to a spreadsheet – if the PDF was “printed” from a computer application. Introduced earlier this year, Tabula continues to evolve thanks to the volunteer efforts of Manuel, with help from OpenNews Fellow Mike Tigas and New York Times interactive developer Jeremy Merrill. Meanwhile, DocHive, a tool whose continuing development is being funded by a Knight Foundation grant, addresses PDFs that were created by scanning paper documents. DocHive is a project of Raleigh Public Record and is led by Charles and Edward Duncan.
These open source tools join a number of commercial offerings such as Able2Extract and ABBYY Fine Reader that extract data from PDFs. A more comprehensive list of open source and commercial resources is available here.
Unfortunately, the free and low cost tools available to modelers, data journalists and transparency advocates have limitations that hinder their ability to handle large scale tasks. If, like me, you want to submit hundreds of PDFs to a software tool, press “Go” and see large volumes of cleanly formatted data, you are out of luck.
It is for this reason that I am working with The Sunlight Foundation and other sponsors to stage the PDF Liberation Hackathon from January 17-19, 2014. We’ll have hack sites at Sunlight’s Washington DC office and at RallyPad in San Francisco. Developers can also join remotely because we will publish a number of clearly specified PDF extraction challenges before the hackathon.
Participants can work on one of the pre-specified challenges or choose their own PDF extraction projects. Ideally, hackathon teams will use (and hopefully improve upon) open source tools to meet the hacking challenges, but they will also be allowed to embed commercial tools into their projects as long as their licensing cost is less than $1000 and an unlimited trial is available.
Prizes of up to $500 will be awarded to winning entries. To receive a prize, a team must publish their source code on a GitHub public repository. To join the hackathon in DC or remotely, please sign up at Eventbrite; to hack with us in SF, please sign up via this Meetup. Please also complete our Google Form survey. Also, if anyone reading this is associated with an organization in New York or Chicago that would like to organize an additional hack space, please contact me.
The PDF Liberation Hackathon is going to be a great opportunity to advance the state of the art when it comes to harvesting data from public documents. I hope you can join us.
Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes
Tonight I’m going to be on a panel over at Columbia’s Journalism School called Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes. It’s being organized by Nick Diakopoulos, Tow Fellow and previous guest blogger on mathbabe. You can sign up to come here and it will also be livestreamed.
The other panelists are Scott Klein from ProPublica and Clifford Stein from Columbia. I’m super excited to meet them.
Unlike some panel discussions I’ve been on, where the panelists talk about some topic they choose for a few minutes each and then there are questions, this panel will be centered around a draft of a paper coming from the Tow Center at Columbia. First Nick will present the paper and then the panelists will respond to it. Then there will be Q&A.
I wish I could share it with you but it doesn’t seem publicly available yet. Suffice it to say it has many elements in common with Nick’s guest post on raging against the algorithms, and its overall goal is to understand how investigative journalism should handle a world filled with black box algorithms.
Super interesting stuff, and I’m looking forward to tonight, even if it means I’ll miss the New Day New York rally in Foley Square tonight.
The cost savings of food stamps cuts versus the cost increases of diabetes care
As many of you are aware, food stamps were recently cut in this country. This has had a brutal effect on people and families and on neighborhood food pantries, which are being swamped with new customers and increased need among their existing customers.
One thing that I come away with when I read articles describing this problem is how often they detail individuals who have been diagnosed with diabetes but can no longer afford to pay for appropriate food for their condition.
As a person with a family history of diabetes, and someone who has been actively avoiding sugars and carbs to control my blood sugar for the past couple of years, I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for these struggling people.
Let me put it another way. Eating well in this country is expensive, and I’ve had to spend real money on food here in New York City to avoid sugary and fast carb-laden food. I don’t think I could have done that on a skimpy food budget. It’s especially hard to imagine budgeting healthy food on a withering food stamp budget.
Because here’s the thing, and it’s not a secret: shitty food is cheap. If I need to buy lots of food (read: calories) for a small amount of money, I can do it easily, but it will be hell for my blood sugar control. I’m guessing I’d be a full-blown diabetic by now if I were poor and on food stamps.
And that brings me to my nerd question of the morning. How much money are we really saving by decreasing the food stamp allowance in this country, if we consider how many more people will be diagnosed diabetic as a result of the decreased quality of their diet? And how many people’s diabetes will get worse, and how much will that cost?
It’s not over, either: apparently more cuts are coming over the next 10 years (maybe by $4 billion, maybe by $40 billion). And although diabetes care costs have gone up 40% in the last 5 years ($245 billion in 2012 from $174 billion in 2007), that doesn’t mean they won’t go up way more in the next 10.
I’m not an expert on how this all works, but the scale is right – we’re talking billions of dollars nationally, so not small potatoes, and of course we’re also talking about people’s quality of life. Never mind in a moral context – I’m definitely of the mind that people should be able to eat – I’m wondering if the food stamp cuts make sense in a dollars and cents context.
Please tell me if you know of an analysis in this direction.
What are Walmart’s wage incentives?
Suppose you have a employer – think Walmart – that has a ubiquitous presence nationally – think the United States. Is there ever a point, as that employer grows in size and employs more and more of the nation, that its agenda becomes aligned with the national agenda of prosperity and well-being?
That’s the interesting assumption behind a recent Guardian article called Walmart and Downton Abbey: rampant inequality and detachment from reality written by Sadhbh Walshe. From the article:
The best thing the top brass at Walmart could do to preserve their own privileged status would be to raise wages for their workers. A recent study by the progressive thinktank Demos illustrated that the company could afford to pay its workers an additional $5.83 an hour (pdf), enough to bring their wages just above the poverty level, simply by ending the company’s share-buyback program. This way prices could stay as they are but sales would increase as more workers would have more money to spend.
This comes up a lot in my Occupy group as well – the idea that raising wages would be good for low-wage companies like McDonalds and Walmart. The question I have is, is it true? (Aside to readers: if you’re aware of a paper that does this analysis, please tell me!) My guess is no.
Let’s put it this way. If I’m a small company then it’s pretty clear I don’t want to raise wages if I don’t have to. The lower the wages for my workers are, the more I get to keep or spend on other things. But as I grow in size, it might actually make sense, depending on context. If I employ 50% of the population, which is indeed an enormous number of people, then how much I pay them goes straight to the bottomline of how much they spend at my store. But again, it all depends on context.
And there’s and important bit of context going on here, which was beautifully explained recently by Bloomberg columnist Barry Ritholtz in his column entitled How McDonald’s and Wal-Mart Became Welfare Queens. From that article:
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private sector employer, is also the biggest consumer of taxpayer supported aid. According to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, in many states, Wal-Mart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. Wal-mart’s “associates” are paid so little, according to Grayson, that they receive $1,000 on average in public assistance. These amount to massive taxpayer subsidies for private companies.
My point is this. Given their welfare queen status, the agenda of Walmart and other huge low-wage employers is not actually aligned with the nation’s. As long as it can lower wages below poverty level, leaving Uncle Sam to make up some of the difference, and either pocket that difference or distribute them to their shareholders, they’ll continue to do so. The incentives are wrong.
And instead of appealing to their greed and telling them it’s in their best interest to raise wages, which I don’t believe is true (but I’d love to be wrong!), we need to raise political awareness about how the system actually works. And my guess is we should either raise the minimum wage – and then tie it to inflation – or establish a basic income guarantee.
Protest JP Morgan at noon on Wednesday #OccupyJPM #OWS
I’m looking forward to protesting in front of JP Morgan with my #OWS Alt Banking group this Wednesday at noon. The exact location is 270 Park Avenue, near 48th Street.
It’s part of a “Week of Action” being put together by a broad coalition of activist and labor groups here in New York. The overall theme of the week is to try to communicate to New Yorkers, in this time of transition from Bloomberg to de Blasio, that we can effect positive change in our city. The theme of the day on Wednesday, at least for us, is to “be in the know,” which makes it a bit more positive than other protests we’ve been part of.
I think this makes sense. There’s so much widespread distrust and hatred of the big banks at this point that I feel like Occupy’s role has gone from provoking people to be outraged to provoking people to be hopeful. Hopeful about the fact that things could be a whole lot better than this, if we work together.
Anyhoo, we spent yesterday planning the action, and made some signs. Here’s one based on an idea we borrowed from Alexis Goldstein from her recent twitter war with JPMorgan:
and here’s a sign we’ll hold up while playing a “rigged game” with props:
I also made a sign that referenced the London Whale and the risk model, but someone said we might need to give people a copy of our recent book, Occupy Finance, just to understand that sign. Sigh.
The facebook page is here, please share it with people who may be able to join us Wednesday!
Aunt Pythia’s advice: the long and boring edition
If you’re feeling anything like Aunt Pythia is feeling, you don’t want to even look at any food that has been peeled, baked, poured into a pie crust, mashed with butter, or stuffed into a turkey. It’s chopped cucumbers and raw apples from here on out, with plentiful brisk walks in the sunshine. Yes or no?
And also, is it just me, or has it been approximately 40 years since Aunt Pythia’s last column? Or is that just measured in “dishes done” years?
Before Aunt Pythia gets down to the advice part of the column, which is particularly long and boring and for which she apologizes, she wants to draw attention to the Black Friday protests that many of her Occupy friends took part in yesterday in Secaucus, New Jersey at Walmart.
It was a national day of Walmart protests, but here in Secaucus we had a large Occupy presence – note my friend Marni, who is holding up a deceased Walmart employee. More pictures are available here.
Now down to business. As you enjoy today’s column (or as you nod your way through it, as the case may be),
please, think of something to ask Aunt Pythia at the bottom of the page!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Some cosmological theories talk about the universe as being a mathematical space, rather than a pile of floating rocks and other real stuff. I always thought that mathematics consisted of rules for writing squiggles on bits of paper that sometimes produced sets of squiggles that corresponded with the real out-there stuff.
Am I a tiny part of the solution to a humungous equation? I’m happy with being made of fundamental particles but this is something else. What’s your take? Are there any practical consequences?
Perplexed
Dear Perplexed,
I’m no philosopher, but as a mathematician I’m here to tell you that mathematics doesn’t describe the universe. It’s at most used as a tool to understand certain parts of the universe, but only at the level of an approximation.
So for example, there’s no such thing as a circle in reality. It’s an idealized shape we use in mathematics that comes in super handy for various reasons, but because actual matter is made up of stuff, there’s never going to be a true circle, except in our brains. You can extend that concept of approximation to other mathematical models of the universe as well, at least as far as I understand it (Peter, please correct me if I’m wrong here!).
As far as each of us being a tiny part of a solution to a humungous equation, it all depends on how you look at it. I’m sure I can set up an equation that would dictate how many children my parents had, and then by construction I’d be in some sense a part of the solution to that. If you’re thinking more metaphysical than that, I can’t help you, and I doubt it would be more meaningful than that, although it might be wrapped up in fancier wrappers.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am mulling reinventing myself (again). I used to be a lawyer, but it was entirely too demanding and inhumane to manage that and a family life. So I downshifted. Now I use the law degree writing for a legal publication. It’s a 40 hour work week, I have awesome benefits, I am able to take my kids (including the special needs one) to all their crap.
There are only two problems with this nirvana: I don’t make a lot and I’m bored off my butt. My spouse is, unfortunately, utterly useless at home and has proven that he (1) will always put work first, period – because he thinks he’s making the world a better place, and (2) won’t sell out and make some money, because that would be evil. Look, it’s a package deal and that’s who he is, apparently.
This leaves me with a conundrum, and I’m getting quite tired of being poor. One needs a tutor and one needs more behavioral therapy, and I’m not sure where that money is going to come from. I can go and take a government counsel job, I believe that I can get one, and make substantially more than I make now. Like, twice as much roughly. The hours will be a little worse, the commute will be a lot worse. All told, I figure I’d lose 2 extra hours a day, at least.
There’s no guarantee I’ll like it, of course, but I know I’m bored with the current job. And it has no room for growth. I wonder if I’m better off trying to take a second job or make money contracting rather than going whole hog and jumping careers again? I’ve been where I am about 3 years.
Considering Aunt Pythia has jumped ship quite a few times with her skill set, I’m curious if she has insight for me.
Proudly OK on Rent, But Otherwise Rarely Excited Daily
Dear POoR, BORED,
First, I appreciate your sign-off, and second, you were seriously bumping up against the length limit but the sign-off got you through.
And I get needing to prioritize your kids, but I’m going to take issue with two things: your hubby and your boredom.
First, your boredom. Not cool. You need to be interested in your own life, and being bored off your butt is seriously not cutting it. Be more selfish than that, and do it for your kids. They need a mom who’s also a role model. Go find a better job, that pays enough for your needs and that interests you.
Second, your husband. Also not cool that he’s “utterly useless at home,” both because you are wasting time resenting him and because you genuinely need his help. And don’t give me that “because he’s saving the world” crap. He’s not helpful because he’s gotten away with not being helpful. It’s a deal you made with him, possibly (probably) without thinking enough about it. Time to renegotiate. Oh, and renegotiating shitty deals that don’t work for you is also a good role modeling opportunity for your kids.
Here’s how I’d work this. Sit your husband down when the two of you have time, on a weekend evening after the kids are asleep, and tell him you’re bored, need a more challenging job, and that will mean he needs to help out with the house and the kids, because chances are your new job will have more commuting time or whatever.
Next, explain how you’ve worked out the schedule for both of you (if you need to), or ask him to help work it out with you so that it all works. Don’t ask him for help like he’s got an option, because you need this, and that means the family needs this. You guys are a team, and teams work together to make things work.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
Two economists have recently posted a paper arguing that Fields Medalists’ productivity decreases after they get their Fields Medal. While this certainly seems plausible psychologically (after all, proving minor theorems might seem anti-climactic after you’ve solved the major open problem in your field), when I looked at this paper, it seemed that the statistics in it were very naive, in that the authors completely ignored any possible post-conditioning; this leads me to believe that the conclusion is quite likely to be wrong. I have two questions:
Are the statistics used in most economics papers this poor, and if so, how can we trust economists to run our economy?
Would it be worth redoing the statistics in this paper to show up these economists, and maybe to defend Fields Medalists against their charges of being lazy?
Burnt-Out Prizewinner
Dear BOP,
First of all, without even reading the paper I’d say we shouldn’t trust economists to run our economy. They have already proved their vested interests are too distracting for such a responsibility.
Second, I scanned the paper, and I’m not very interested in their model but I am kind of interested in their appendix, where they have the following graph:
After all, I want to see the data, and here it is. Look carefully at the comparison group for the Fields Medalists: people who won another big award besides the Fields Medal and have “above-media per-year citations” during the eligibility period.
My question is, why did they include that second part about citations? It’s muddying the waters, for me at least. Did the actual winners also have above-median per-year citations? Are we assuming that the Fields Medal committee uses that as a criterion for eligibility? It’s weird, and I think the data would be cleaner without that stipulation: we’d just be comparing Fields Medalists versus “other” medalists. Now I’m thinking we’re cherry picking. After all, I can imagine that people who get lots of citations are also like to write more papers.
Next, I’d like to see the data on the individual basis or in some way see what kind of error bars we’re talking about here. The fact that there’s a three-year average in the above graph tells me this data is somewhat noisy. Plus the fact that the three-year average is centered on the middle year is weird. All graphs should reflect data known by a certain date.
But finally, I’m willing to ask, who cares? I guess I don’t care about awards in math much, but even if I did, I’m not willing to agree that the whole point of giving out Fields Medals is to “encourage further achievement” on the part of the recipient, even if Fields himself said that. I’ma go with the other reason, which is to get people to compete against each other (yuck).
Whatever, it’s not like you’re going to get a second Fields Medal or something. If you were doing stuff in order to win a Fields Medal, then after getting it, you’d stop, right, and do something else that’s interesting? Makes sense to me.
Aunt Pythia
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Dear Aunt Pythia,
I agree with your answers to recent question that often enough folks’ criticism of others stems from their own insecurities. Meditating on the fact was making me depressed, until I found an uneaten cupcake in the cupboard, and then thought: do you think that it also works the other way around?
Even if it doesn’t, your site is da bomb! <fingers crossed>.
Mmmm…a cupcake
Dear Mmmm,
First of all, I don’t trust cupcakes in cupboards. At least at my house that signals something very very wrong, that a cupcake made it into a cupboard. Shoulda at most made it onto the counter. Most cupcakes don’t make it out of the shopping bag around here.
Second of all, are you crossing your fingers because you’re hoping to get your question into the column? Or is it because you’re hoping mathbabe.org really is da bomb? Cuz it is, so your hopes have been fully realized.
Next, to your question. By “the other way around,” I’m going to guess you mean the following: when people are insecure about something, they accuse others of having that flaw. The answer is yes, absolutely.
In fact it’s generally true that when someone is sensitized to an issue, even if it’s not one of insecurity, then they see it everywhere, all the time, as if for the first time. There’s a running joke in my family that whenever someone starts a sentence with “Have you noticed lately that…” then what follows that will be a selection bias in exactly that way. So, have you noticed lately that everyone is wearing incredibly awesome flannel shirts? That’s because I got comfort on da mind over here.
Anyhoo, same thing for insecurities. If one is feeling like one’s acne is out of control, one sees other people’s pimples a mile away. If I am ashamed of myself for being overly bossy, then I see overbearing behavior everywhere and I can’t understand how people can stand it. And although we do our best to not accuse people of stuff we’re aware of being sensitized to, it doesn’t always work out that way.
Best,
Aunt Pythia
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Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
mathbabe 