“The only thing we really learned from the S&L scandal was how CEO’s should lawyer up”
The title of today’s piece is a quote from economist Chris Thornberg in a Reuters interview I found a couple of days ago.
It’s almost 15 minutes long, and the first couple of minutes are concerned with the housing market, which he has strong opinions on and I don’t, but then he moves on to financial regulation, the question of accountability, municipal bankruptcies, and whether economists suck at their jobs, subjects I care about a lot.
It’s a super interesting interview, and I’m planning to mail Thornberg a copy of Occupy Finance soon. Even though he serves on the advisory board of hedge fund Paulson & Co, he agrees with lots of people who come to Alternative Banking on many issues.
A few examples of what he’s talking about for those of you without 15 minutes to spend on him.
Regulation
He talks about how Dodd-Frank is collapsing in on itself through extensive watering-down and lobbying, and how negotiations over how much “skin in the game” is required around securitization is the death knell of that process.
He talks about how the overall system is under-regulated and not being made accountable. He claims that, instead of trying to draw lines in the sand, we should try to attack the skewed incentives. A lot of people got very rich doing very bad things, he says, and the continued existence of those messed-up incentives will encourage a whole new generation to do the same.
For example, bonuses shouldn’t be given on how many loans you push out into the market but how they perform. We should be able to clawback money, which is to say pull back money from someone who’s done something bad. After all, he points out, Dick Fuld and Angelo Mozilo as men who became filthy rich from doing bad things and are now “untouchable”.
Washington
He also points out that D.C. never went through a recession because of money coming in through lobbying. His top two priorities to improve our system would be:
- To simplify the tax code, both corporate and personal. There too many special interests. Get rid of complexity and make it more progressive.
- Political reform. We like to say the Chinese are “one-party state”. But are we really two-party? We have very little “choice” especially if you take into account the gerrymandering. California is doing a good job reforming here.
Municipal Bankruptcies
Next, he moves onto municipal emergencies in Detroit, Stockton, and San Bernadino. All three city bankruptcies pose the fundamental decisions: what is the sanctity of public pensions? State laws generally insist that pensions be paid.
The issue here is, says Thornberg, that federal bankruptcy laws trump, not state law. So the relevant federal judge can say “too bad” to the contract, and the pensioners will be forced to take a cut like all the other debtholders.
Lawyers in the know think pensions are gonna go, and that precedent for this kind of thing is being established in these three cities in the very near future.
Economics
The Reuters interviewer addressed the issue that, generally speaking, economists missed the oncoming crisis. Does that mean there’s something wrong with economics?
Thornberg: “Professors don’t get published writing papers about the current economy – nobody cares about that.”
He claims that, yes, economists should be more on top of day-to-day stuff, but he claims that the critique misses the broader point, which is that everyone needs to be a better economist. He claims it is a social science which tries to address why people do what they do. And although economists would like to think of it as a mathematical science, they’re wrong to do so.
His advice: don’t listen to economists on TV. Educate yourself and know your source. It’s amazing how much stock we put into economists working for, say, the National Association of Realtors who get paid to say good things like, “it’s a good time to buy and sell a house!”
New Essay, On Being a Data Skeptic, now out
It is available here and is based on a related essay written by Susan Webber entitled “Management’s Great Addiction: It’s time we recognized that we just can’t measure everything.” It is being published by O’Reilly as an e-book.
No, I don’t know who that woman is looking skeptical on the cover. I wish they’d asked me for a picture of a skeptical person, I think my 11-year-old son would’ve done a better job.
“Here and Now” is shilling for the College Board
Did you think public radio doesn’t have advertising? Think again.
Last week Here and Now’s host Jeremy Hobson set up College Board’s James Montoya for a perfect advertisement regarding a story on SAT scores going down. The transcript and recording are here (hat tip Becky Jaffe).
To set it up, they talk about how GPA’s are going up on average over the country but how, at the same time, the average SAT score went down last year.
Somehow the interpretation of this is that there’s grade inflation and that kids must be in need of more test prep because they’re dumber.
What is the College Board?
You might think, especially if you listen to this interview, that the college board is a thoughtful non-profit dedicated to getting kids prepared for college.
Make no mistake about it: the College Board is a big business, and much of their money comes from selling test prep stuff on top of administering tests. Here are a couple of things you might want to know about College Board through its wikipedia page:
Consumer rights organization Americans for Educational Testing Reform (AETR) has criticized College Board for violating its non-profit status through excessive profits and exorbitant executive compensation; nineteen of its executives make more than $300,000 per year, with CEO Gaston Caperton earning $1.3 million in 2009 (including deferred compensation).[10][11] AETR also claims that College Board is acting unethically by selling test preparation materials, directly lobbying legislators and government officials, and refusing to acknowledge test-taker rights.[12]
Anyhoo, let’s just say it this way: College Board has the ability to create an “emergency” about SAT scores, by say changing the test or making it harder, and then the only “reasonable response” is to pay for yet more test prep. And somehow Here and Now’s host Jeremy Hobson didn’t see this coming at all.
The interview
Here’s an excerpt:
HOBSON: It also suggests, when you look at the year-over-year scores, the averages, that things are getting worse, not better, because if I look at, for example, in critical reading in 2006, the average being 503, and now it’s 496. Same deal in math and writing. They’ve gone down.
MONTOYA: Well, at the same time that we have seen the scores go down, what’s very interesting is that we have seen the average GPAs reported going up. So, for example, when we look at SAT test takers this year, 48 percent reported having a GPA in the A range compared to 45 percent last year, compared to 44 percent in 2011, I think, suggesting that there simply have to be more rigor in core courses.
HOBSON: Well, and maybe that there’s grade inflation going on.
MONTOYA: Well, clearly, that there is grade inflation. There is no question about that. And it’s one of the reasons why standardized test scores are so important in the admission office. I know that, as a former dean of admission, test scores help gauge the meaning of a GPA, particularly given the fact that nearly half of all SAT takers are reporting a GPA in the A range.
Just to be super clear about the shilling, here’s Hobson a bit later in the interview:
HOBSON: Well – and we should say that your report noted – since you mentioned practice – that as is the case with the ACT, the students who take the rigorous prep courses do better on the SAT.
What does it really mean when SAT scores go down?
Here’s the thing. SAT scores are fucked with ALL THE TIME. Traditionally, they had to make SAT’s harder since people were getting better at them. As test-makers, they want a good bell curve, so they need to adjust the test as the population changes and as their habits of test prep change.
The result is that SAT tests are different every year, so just saying that the scores went down from year to year is meaningless. Even if the same group of kids took those two different tests in the same year, they’d have different scores.
Also, according to my friend Becky who works with kids preparing for the SAT, they really did make substantial changes recently in the math section, changing the function notation, which makes it much harder for kids to parse the questions. In other words, they switched something around to give kids reason to pay for more test prep.
Important: this has nothing to do with their knowledge, it has to do with their training for this specific test.
If you want to understand the issues outside of math, take for example the essay. According to this critique, the number one criterion for essay grade is length. Length trumps clarity of expression, relevance of the supporting arguments to the thesis, mechanics, and all other elements of quality writing. As my friend Becky says:
I have coached high school students on the SAT for years and have found time and again, much to my chagrin, that students receive top scores for long essays even if they are desultory, tangent-filled and riddled with sentence fragments, run-ons, and spelling errors.
Similarly, I have consistently seen students receive low scores for shorter essays that are thoughtful and sophisticated, logical and coherent, stylish and articulate.
As long as the number one criterion for receiving a high score on the SAT essay is length, students will be confused as to what constitutes successful college writing and scoring well on the written portion of the exam will remain essentially meaningless. High-scoring students will have to unlearn the strategies that led to success on the SAT essay and relearn the fundamentals of written expression in a college writing class.
If the College Board (the makers of the SAT) is so concerned about the dumbing down of American children, they should examine their own role in lowering and distorting the standards for written expression.
Conclusion
Two things. First, shame on College Board and James Montoya for acting like SAT scores are somehow beacons of truth without acknowledging the fiddling that goes on time and time again by his company. And second, shame on Here and Now and Jemery Hobson for being utterly naive and buying in entirely to this scare tactic.
Sunday morning reading
I wanted to share with you guys a few things I’ve been interested in this weekend.
First, this TED talk which for whatever reason never made it onto the TED main website. It’s by Nick Hanauer, and in it he dispels some common economic myths, much like Chapter 7 of Occupy Finance. A juicy quote: “So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
Next, it turns out women are way better than men at orgasms, at least those where you do it all in your head – a “think off”. A full 2% of women can fantasize their way to climax (compared to, I guess, way fewer men) and there’s even training for this skill. Two questions from the mathbabe. First, do wet dreams count? Because if they do I think we’ll have to recount. Second, say I invest my time in this, and get really good at it, since it’s all hands-free and such and will make my life that much more efficient. Is this something that takes a lot of time? Can I do it whilst carrying groceries home, or whilst cooking dinner? On the subway? Between stops? Details please.
Next, here’s an important discussion of why junior people get criminally prosecuted – in this case, for the debacle that was the JP Morgan London Whale case – while the big bosses just get vaguely complained about in a civil case, and the shareholders end up paying huge fines for their misbehavior. Last two lines: “Yet it remains disquieting when the same actions result in criminal charges for some but only a civil case for others, and no individuals are held responsible for misconduct at a company. In the end, we are left to trust that prosecutors have made good decisions.” There’s no recourse for bad prosecuting either. How do we even protest bad prosecuting?
Next, I’ve been listening to some seriously catchy and funny tunes my boys turned me on to. What makes me old is how long it takes me to catch on to stuff, since I heard this one years ago, but it seems that everything that these guys touch is hilarious. Especially this one (also see “I Just Had Sex” and “Jack Sparrow“):
Finally, I’m really into knitting recently, and I recently figured out how to knit this pattern even though you’d have to pay big bucks to get the official pattern. Email me if you’re interested in the bootleg version.
Not mine – I stole this picture. I am still working on mine.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Thanks guys, Aunt Pythia has been feeling some love this week, ever since I threatened to murder her. Nothing like a damsel in distress to get the ethical-dilemma juices flowing. Please keep the questions coming though, we don’t want her continually scared and exhausted, that’s no way to live.
In other words, enjoy today’s advice, but please:
Don’t forget to ask a question at the bottom!!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My partner needs to find a new job. I believe she needs to (at least partially) reinvent herself, although she’s not very adventurous.
You’ve reinvented yourself a few times, you probably know a great deal about what works in this process. I remember you once posted about creating a spreadsheet and recording what you like, what you don’t etc until you found your dream job.
I’m looking for this type of exercises that would challenge her to find a job she loves as opposed to the job she can easily land. Any other insights from your remodeling thought process? Any other resources/reference you would recommend?
Abelian Grape
Dear Abelian,
I don’t believe much in astrology, but I can dig the next closest thing, which is personality tests. I recently looked in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and discovered that I’m a so-called “ENTP”, which is to say extroverted (duh), intuitive, thinking, and perceptive. Who knows why, a test told me[1]. That means I’m:
Quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert, and outspoken. Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems. Adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analyzing them strategically. Good at reading other people. Bored by routine, will seldom do the same thing the same way, apt to turn to one new interest after another.
Why do I mention this? First of all because everyone loves talking about personality tests – trust me – and second of all because it’s in my nature to reinvent myself. I don’t do it because I’m theoretically excited by reinvention, but because I’m bored and compelled to start something new.
So, two conclusions. First, your partner might just not be like that. Second, she might be like that in special circumstances, but in that case she’d need to get to the point of frustration and boredom that she’s the one writing to Aunt Pythia for advice on self-reinvention rather than you. Once that happens I will indeed point her to my tools of reinvention.
My advice is to be supportive of her but not to push her into “reinvention” if that’s not how she rolls. It just won’t work and it will feel to her like another thing she’s failing at. Wait for her, and if you’re not the kind of person that is patient, then that’s a problem in itself and I’ll expect to hear back from you, although given how impatient I am, the advice won’t be hopeful.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
1. Actually, one test told me that, then another one said “ENFJ”, but “ENTP” helps me make my point better.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I hope you’re feeling better.
This is, I admit, a rather lame question, as I am sure I could’ve answered it myself when I was a student. But now I’m old and hence stupid.
I’ll phrase it as a “sock drawer” question. Suppose my drawer contained 44 black socks and 116 white ones, and I draw them out blindly in pairs. What are the chances of getting exactly 10 black pairs?
More generally, if I have b black and w white socks, what is the probability of getting exactly p pairs of black ones?
Thanks Pythia-babe!
Socks Maniac
Dear Socks,
Are the socks already rolled into pairs? Not clear from your question, but I’ll assume so. Otherwise the question is harder, so please do re-submit if I got it wrong. Also, are you blindly taking out exactly 10 pairs and looking to see if they’re all black? I’ll assume that too since you didn’t specify.
Assuming the above, we’re starting with 22 black pairs and 58 white pairs in a drawer, and we take out 10 pairs, and we’re wondering what the chances are that they’re all black. We just need to count the total ways they could be all black and then divide by the total ways we could have done the extraction.
Start with the “all black” count: there are 22 ways we could choose the first black pair, then 21 ways to choose the second black pair, etc., so we get 22*21* … *13 ways altogether to get 10 black pairs.
Next, count the “anything goes” possibilities: we have 22+58=80 pairs of socks altogether, which means we have 80 ways to choose the first pair, then 79 ways to choose the second pair, etc., giving us 80*79*78*…*71 ways to get all ten pairs. Some of them will be all black, but not many.
In fact if you take that ratio – google “22*21*20*19*18*17*16*15*14*13/(80*79*78*77*76*75*74*73*72*71)” – you will see that the answer is very small indeed: 4e-7. You know it’s small if you need scientific notation.
Auntie P
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I’ve spent the last year and a half working as, effectively, project manager to get a fairly cool academic mobile app out the door. We’ve applied for a grant to renew the project, but if the grant fails, I’ll be asked to leave $reallyNiceCountry again.
How do I manage the sense of powerlessness that stems from being a 30-year-old freshly minted Ph.D. either about to be deported again or offered a job that allows me a sufficient contract window to become a permanent resident?
A sense of loyalty (and major deadlines) mean that I don’t feel right trying to apply for other jobs in case the grant is passed.
Exhausted Academic
Dear Exhausted,
I’m glad you wrote. I really object to your sense of loyalty, and I see this all too often among freshly minted foreign-born Ph.D.’s.
Face it, you are a specialist in a bizarre system (the intersection of the academic system and the U.S. visa system) with ridiculously arbitrary and last-minute changes of plan. There is absolutely no reason for you not to develop other plans while you are waiting around for the grant to come through or not. In fact you’re a fool for not applying for other jobs, straight up. Deadlines are a short-term distraction from making your life in a country where you want to live. Your life plan is your priority, not someone else’s app deadline.
Here’s my advice, to you and to anyone else in a related situation. No wonder you’re feeling helpless, it’s because you’re acting passively and helplessly. Nobody is going to think strategically about your future except you. Never let this happen again, and get thee on the job market immediately. People with your education level and mad skillz will get great jobs if they go and look. But you gotta go and look. And if you need to learn other stuff to get a good job, then go learn that stuff. But don’t act like the stupid NSF is the voice of God.
Good luck!
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Why is it that the students for whom you’ve made the most opportunity, and invested the most in, are the ones that ultimately screw you?
Pissed Off Professor
Dear POP,
Without more details, I’m going to have to use my imagination here.
I can understand what you might mean by making opportunities for your students – you help them with their work, you write them letters, you make calls and introductions on their behalf to help them land jobs. Granted, it can be a lot of work and you are staking your reputation on their work ethic and smarts. On the other hand, it is your job, and you get paid for it, and your reputation also grows with theirs.
But I’m getting a bit lost with the them-screwing-you part. If they simply aren’t very good at the jobs you help them get, then I don’t think that can be considered screwing you. It’s hard for me to imagine exactly what that could mean beyond that. Is the student spreading nasty rumors about your work? Are there internal politics in your field and your student isn’t in your camp? Has the student stolen your ideas?
Or is it something totally normal, like the student doesn’t express sufficient gratitude for your help? In this case I’d say, welcome to young people. Being an advisor is a lot like being a parent, and in this society we don’t get lots of gratitude as parents. Move to China if you want that stuff.
Or maybe I missed it altogether, which is why you’d need to say more when you write back.
Aunt Pytha
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Sometimes, The World Is Telling You To Polish Up Your LinkedIn Profile
The above title was stolen verbatim from an excellent essay by Dan Milstein on the Hut 8 Labs blog (hat tip Deane Yang). The actual title of the essay is “No Deadlines For You! Software Dev Without Estimates, Specs or Other Lies”
He wrote the essay about how, as an engineer, you can both make yourself invaluable to your company and avoid meaningless and arbitrary deadlines on your projects. So, he’s an engineer, but the advice he gives is surprisingly close to the advice I was trying to give on Monday night when I spoke at the Columbia Data Science Society (my slides are here, by the way). More on that below.
Milstein is an engaging writer. He wrote a book called Coding, Fast and Slow, which I now feel like reading just because I enjoy his insights and style. Here’s a small excerpt:
Let’s say you’ve started at a new job, leading a small team of engineers. On your first day, an Important Person comes by your desk. After some welcome-to-the-business chit chat, he/she hands you a spec. You look it over—it describes a new report to add to the company’s product. Of course, like all specs, it’s pretty vague, and, worse, it uses some jargon you’ve heard around the office, but haven’t quite figured out yet.
You look up from the spec to discover that the Important Person is staring at you expectantly: “So, <Your Name>, do you think you and your team can get that done in 3 months?”
What do you do?
Here are some possible approaches (all of which I’ve tried… and none of which has ever worked out well):
- Immediately try to flesh out the spec in more detail
“How are we summing up this number? Is this piece of data required? What does <jargon word> mean, here, exactly?”
- Stall, and take the spec to your new team
“Hmm. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmm. Do you think, um, Bob (that’s his name, right?) has the best handle on these kinds of things?”
- Give the spec a quick skim, and then listen to the seductive voice of System I
“Sure, yeah, 3 months sounds reasonable” (OMG, I wish this wasn’t something I’ve doneSO MANY TIMES).
- Push back aggressively
“I read this incredibly convincing blog post 1 about how it’s impossible to commit to deadlines for software projects, sorry, I just can’t do that.”
He then goes on to write that very blog post. In it, he explains what you should do, which is to learn why the project has been planned in the first place, and what the actual business question is, so you have full context for your job and you know what it means to the company for this to succeed or fail.
The way I say this, regularly, to aspiring data scientists I run into, is that you are often given a data science question that’s been filtered from a business question, through a secondary person who has some idea that they’ve molded that business question into a “mathematical question,” and they want you to do the work of answering that question, under some time constraint and resource constraints that they’ve also picked out of the air.
But often that process has perverted the original aims – often because proxies have magically appeared in the place of the original objects of interest – and it behooves a data scientist who doesn’t want to be working on the wrong problem to go to the original source and verify that their work is answering a vital business question, that they’re optimizing for the right thing, and that they understand the actual constraints (like deadlines but also resources) rather than the artificial constraints made up by whoever is in charge of telling the nerds what to do.
In other words, I suggest that each data scientist “becomes part business person,” and talks to the business owner of the given problem directly until they’re sure they know what needs to get done with data.
Milstein has a bunch of great tips on how to go through with this process, including:
- Counting on people’s enjoyment of hearing their own ideas repeated and fears understood,
- Using a specific template when talking to Important People, namely a) “I’m going to echo that back, make sure I understand”, b) echo it back, c) “Do I have that right?”.
- To always think and discuss your work in terms of risks and information for the business. Things like, you need this information to answer this risk. The point here is it always stays relevant to the business people while you do your technical thing. This means always keeping a finger on the pulse of the business problem.
- Framing choices for the Important Person in terms of clear trade-offs of risk, investments, and completion. This engages the business in what your process is in a completely understandable way.
- Finally, if your manager doesn’t let you talk directly to the Important People in the business, and you can’t convince your manager to change his or her mind, then you might wanna polish up your LinkedIn profile, because otherwise you are fated to work on failed projects. Great advice.
A Code of Conduct for data scientists from the Bellagio Fellows
The 2013 PopTech & Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellows – Kate Crawford, Patrick Meier, Claudia Perlich, Amy Luers, Gustavo Faleiros and Jer Thorp – yesterday published “Seven Principles for Big Data and Resilience Projects” on Patrick Meier’s blog iRevolution.
Although they claim that these principles are meant for “best practices for resilience building projects that leverage Big Data and Advanced Computing,” I think they’re more general than that (although I’m not sure exactly what a resilience building project is) I and I really like them. They are looking for public comments too. Go to the post for the full description of each, but here is a summary:
1. Open Source Data Tools
Wherever possible, data analytics and manipulation tools should be open source, architecture independent and broadly prevalent (R, python, etc.).
2. Transparent Data Infrastructure
Infrastructure for data collection and storage should operate based on transparent standards to maximize the number of users that can interact with the infrastructure.
3. Develop and Maintain Local Skills
Make “Data Literacy” more widespread. Leverage local data labor and build on existing skills.
4. Local Data Ownership
Use Creative Commons and licenses that state that data is not to be used for commercial purposes.
5. Ethical Data Sharing
Adopt existing data sharing protocols like the ICRC’s (2013). Permission for sharing is essential. How the data will be used should be clearly articulated. An opt in approach should be the preference wherever possible, and the ability for individuals to remove themselves from a data set after it has been collected must always be an option.
6. Right Not To Be Sensed
Local communities have a right not to be sensed. Large scale city sensing projects must have a clear framework for how people are able to be involved or choose not to participate.
7. Learning from Mistakes
Big Data and Resilience projects need to be open to face, report, and discuss failures.
Are you cliterate?
Not much time this morning for blogging, but I wanted everyone to get a chance to read this amazing Huffington Post article about learning more than you ever thought possible about the female sexual organ, and then celebrating that knowledge in style.
The article is actually more inspiring than you’d think, and I found myself weeping with joy at times. I’m an easy cry, but still.
Plus, any article that has this picture is worth reading:
Upcoming talks
Tomorrow evening I’m meeting with the Columbia Data Science Society and talking to them – who as I understand it are mostly engineers – about “how to think like a data scientist”.
On October 11th I’ll be in D.C. sitting on a panel discussion organized by the Americans for Financial Reform. It’s part of a day-long event on the topic of transparency in financial regulation. The official announcement isn’t out yet but I’ll post it here as soon as I can. I’ll be giving my two cents on what mathematical tools can do and cannot do with respect to this stuff.
On October 16th I’ll again be in D.C. giving a talk in the MAA Distinguished Lecture Series to a mostly high school math teacher audience. My talk is entitled, “Start Your Own Netflix”.
Finally, I’m going to Harvard on October 30th to give a talk in their Applied Statistics Workshop series. I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m talking about but it will be something nerdy and skeptical.
I’d like you to eventually die
Google has formally thrown their hat into the “rich people should never die” arena, with an official announcement of their new project called Calico, “a new company that will focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases”. Their plan is to use big data and genetic research to avoid aging.
I saw this coming when they hired Ray Kurzweil. Here’s an excerpt from my post:
A few days ago I read a New York Times interview of Ray Kurzweil, who thinks he’s going to live forever and also claims he will cure cancer if and when he gets it (his excuse for not doing it in his spare time now: “Well, I mean, I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything.”). He also just got hired at Google.
Here’s the thing. We need people to die. Our planet cannot sustain all the people currently alive as well as all the people who are going to someday be born. Just not gonna happen. Plus, it would be a ridiculously boring place to live. Think about how boring it is already for young people to be around old people. I bore myself around my kids, and I’m only 30 years older than they are.
And yes, it’s tragic when someone we love actually becomes one of those people whose time has come, especially if they’re young and especially if it seemed preventable. For that matter, I’m all for figuring out how to improve the quality of life for people.
But the idea that we’re going to figure out how to keep alive a bunch of super rich advertising executives just doesn’t seem right – because, let’s face it, there will have to be a way to choose who lives and who dies, and I know who is at the top of that list – and I for one am not on board with the plan. Larry Page, Tim Cook, and Ray Kurzweil: I’d really like it if you eventually died.
On the other hand, I’m not super worried about this plan coming through either. Big data can do a lot but it’s not going to make people live forever. Or let’s say it another way: if they can use big data to make people live forever, they can also use big data to convince me that super special rich white men living in Silicon Valley should take up resources and airtime for the rest of eternity.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
Peoples! Peoples!
I counted the new Aunt Pythia questions for this week and guess what number I got to?
ZERO! I have ZERO new questions this week!
Now luckily I had a few extra questions stored away so we’re good today, but you know just as well as I that this cannot go on.
Let me say it like this. Either you guys cough up some juicy sex dilemmas or Aunt Pythia goes back to the hospital. I don’t like to make threats, especially to nice little old ladies like Aunt Pythia (actually she’s not that small), but I’ll do whatever it takes. I’m ruthless.
In other words, enjoy today’s advice, but please:
don’t forget to ask a question at the bottom!!
By the way, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My family friends are always asking me suggestions for books/resources to help nurture theirs kids’ interest in mathematics/sciences/engineering. The thing is the only books I could recommend are aimed at the high school level, while usually their kids are still in elementary. Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks,
Perennial educational advice giver in family
Dear Peagif,
My parents did a good job of not turning me off of math by not forcing it down my throat. I’m on that same page, and I never send my kids to math circle or have them read math books or science stuff. But I am always available for a conversation about science or math, and I have a ridiculous number of puzzles lying around the house, at all times.
We also keep well stocked in construction toys like Zome Tools. We also use Zome Tools to make bubbles and we have glow-in-the-dark versions too.
So that’s my advice: nerd toys rock, and they don’t feel pressured.
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
I am a postdoc in math and considering making a change to the private sector. I am still very active in research and teaching (in fact I quite like it, but I feel a change is necessary since academia requires too many compromises), and I am learning python on the side. I am not programming anything too hard-core yet; just little projects from free courses I can find online. I have two questions: right now my CV is very academia-oriented. How should I try to augment it to seem desirable in the wider world? Also, will my age become a serious liability the longer I wait (I am in my early thirties)?
Eagerly awaiting your response,
Liking Academia But Really Ambivalent There
Dear LABRAT,
Ooooooh, nice name. I got a good feeling about your future just from that alone.
So, two things. First, you’re doing it right, and I don’t think your age is a problem. You will want to supplement your math career and python learning with some actual data problems. Take a look around for a nice data set and try to ask a question that you don’t think anyone’s asked but people might care about. Team up with some other nerds trying to learn data stuff so it’s more fun.
Second, I’d like to hear more about your current “compromises”. As I might have mentioned before, my motto is, “you never get rid of your problems, you just get a new set of problems”.
So if you’re sick of the problems you have as an academic, then fine, leave and become a data scientist. But if you think there are no compromises in data science, then think again. They’re different but they exist.
So here’s an offer: you show me your compromises, and I’ll show you mine.
Love,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
My tenure-track position is at a university with non-selective admissions, and it is my first experience of such a college or university (from any viewpoint). A few of my students are quite good, and many are reasonably smart and or reasonably hard-working, but overall, my feeling is that, if these people are our future, then we are doomed. And the statistics tell us that students here are still above average among 18-year-olds. I don’t think most of them could ever learn to code, unless you count copying someone else’s code and modifying a line or two to fix the spelling errors in the output as coding.
Am I going to start believing that we have to all go Amish and stop using technology in order to avoid some apocalypse and or dictatorial dystopia? Worse yet, in twenty years, will I be living in a shack in the woods and mailing bombs everywhere in a futile attempt to reverse the advance of technology?
I could try to get a job at a school with more academically capable students, but the job market is tough, and going to a college or university that would just reject less capable students seems to be just burying my head in the sand. Industry and most government jobs are out, not only because it’s also burying my head in the sand, but also because my previous stint in the computer industry sensitized me to the evil that every for profit organization has to do or be involved it just to stay in business.
Depressed by near universal stupidity
Dear Depressed,
It seems to me that you’re conflating two interesting but different issues. First, whether you should get another job, and where might you do that, and second, what it means that the majority of the citizens don’t understand, and perhaps can’t understand, their ambient environment at a technical level.
Let’s start with the second issue, since it’s honestly more interesting.
The real question is, what do you need to understand to make a living nowadays? Let’s face it, nobody feels compelled to really understand how a microwave works except microwave manufacturers and possibly cancer researchers (apologies to anyone who knows how a microwave works who I’ve left out).
It’s not fair, in other words, to expect everyone to understand everything about a society’s technology. For that matter technology has been around a long time, and the hallmark of a really good technology is that most people don’t have to think about it at all. For a non-microwave example, consider the idea that government itself can be seen as a technology – some big black box where money goes in and reasonable laws and order come out. Note I’m simplifying here.
If you buy that reasoning, then the next question is, why would we even want the majority of people to know how to code? Why don’t we leave that to the subpopulation of people working on stuff that needs coding? Coders are the equivalent of microwave manufacturers, albeit much better paid. It would be a huge waste for the entire population to learn that skill, even if they were interested and capable of doing so (although Miss Disruption would not agree).
So, to come back to you, you’re teaching at a school where most of the people who go to your school are not going to be technical. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do interesting things, of course, even if you don’t know what those interesting things are. And no, I don’t think living like the Amish would be a better option for them. They probably don’t think that what they do is so meaningless that they should replace it with manual labor in the fields.
But you could go ahead and do that yourself, it would solve your job problem, and it would also take you away from many of the people you consider so depressingly stupid.
If you want to get over your concerns, here’s something you could try. First, fully enjoy those students who are interested and good at the things you teach, and second, realize that people can lead super fulfilling and good lives doing nothing whatsoever technical. Indeed Amish people do it all the time, I’m sure, and get pleasure in being good members of the community or whatever floats their Amish boats. Give these young people some credit beyond the narrow question of whether they have this kind of talent and desire, and my guess is you’ll be less depressed.
Good luck,
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
A couple of weeks ago, Aunt Pythia first posted a response to a question about a single person who masturbates to satisfy sexual urges, and if porn would help blah blah, and secondly, she responded to some nerds about fornicating in puzzle shops in hopes it might supply kinky role models to nerds everywhere, and in particular, possibly the ‘guy’ who asked the first question.
So, my question has to do with Aunt Pythia determining the sex of a particular poster, as the first thing I thought after reading that post was, “That poor woman needs to get laid!”
Does Aunt Pythia assume that all people who are single and masturbate without porn are guys, or should we be worried that she employs some Acxiom-style data warehousing techniques on her questions submission form?
Future Endeavors Are Remorseless
Dear FEAR,
Aunt Pythia fears (harhar) you have caught her in a lazy assumption, and she thank you for pointing it out. It is true that she assumed that the masturbator was male, and even though her original response to the masturbator was gender-neutral, her later reference to the masturbator was not. Apologies.
In Aunt Pythia’s defense, if it is allowed (and since this is her column, it is): if she had been going strictly by stereotypes, she might have assumed that the masturbator was female, since the masturbator had evidently never tried porn before. Just sayin’.
Love,
Aunt Pythia
——
Quick question, oh Aunt Pythia lovers: should Auntie P establish a twitter account and answer 140-character questions with 140-character words of advice? This was an idea from a twitter follower. I’m considering it but I need feedback. Maybe people asking for advice don’t want to use their twitter account to do it? Or maybe the idea would be Auntie P could first ask and then answer? Ideas welcome.
In the meantime, please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
The bursting of the big data bubble
It’s been a good ride. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a good time to be a data whiz, a quant-turned-data scientist. I get lots of attention and LinkedIn emails just for my title and my math Ph.D., and it’s flattering. But all of that is going to change, starting now.
You see, there are some serious headwinds. They started a while ago but they’re picking up speed, and the magical wave of hype propelling us forward is giving way. I can tell, I’ve got a nose for sinking ships and sailing metaphors.
First, the hype and why it’s been so strong.
It seems like data and the ability to use data is the secret sauce in so many of the big success stories. Look at Google. They managed to think of the entire web as their data source, and have earned quite a bit of respect and advertising money for their chore of organizing it like a huge-ass free library for our benefit. That took some serious data handling and modeling know-how.
We humans are pretty good at detecting patterns, so after a few companies made it big with the secret data sauce, we inferred that, when you take a normal tech company and sprinkle on data, you get the next Google.
Next, a few reasons it’s unsustainable
Most companies don’t have the data that Google has, and can never hope to cash in on stuff at the scale of the ad traffic that Google sees. Even so, there are lots of smaller but real gains that lots of companies – but not all – could potentially realize if they collected the right kind of data and had good data people helping them.
Unfortunately, this process rarely actually happens the right way, often because the business people ask their data people the wrong questions to being with, and since they think of their data people as little more than pieces of software – data in, magic out – they don’t get their data people sufficiently involved with working on something that data can address.
Also, since there are absolutely no standards for what constitutes a data scientist, and anyone who’s taken a machine learning class at college can claim to be one, the data scientists walking around often have no clue how to actually form the right questions to ask anyway. They are lopsided data people, and only know how to answer already well-defined questions like the ones that Kaggle comes up with. That’s less than half of what a good data scientist does, but people have no idea what a good data scientist does.
Plus, it’s super hard to accumulate hard evidence that you have a crappy data science team. If you’ve hired one or more unqualified data scientists, how can you tell? They still might be able to implement crappy models which don’t answer the right question, but in order to see that you’d need to also have a good data scientist who implements a better solution to the right question. But you only have one. It’s a counterfactual problem.
Here’s what I see happening. People have invested some real money in data, and they’ve gotten burned with a lack of medium-term results. Now they’re getting impatient for proof that data is an appropriate place to invest what little money their VC’s have offered them. That means they want really short-term results, which means they’re lowballing data science expertise, which means they only attract people who’ve taken one machine learning class and fancy themselves experts.
In other words, data science expertise has been commodified, and it’s a race to the bottom. Who will solve my business-critical data problem on a short-term consulting basis for less than $5000? Less than $4000?
What’s next?
There really is a difference between A) crude models that someone constructs not really knowing what they’re doing and B) thoughtful models which gain an edge along the margin. It requires someone who actually knows what they’re doing to get the latter kind of model. But most people are unaware of even the theoretical difference between type A and type B models, nor would they recognize which type they’ve got once they get one.
Even so, over time, type B models outperform type A models, and if you care enough about the marginal edge between the two types, say because you’re in a competitive environment, then you will absolutely need type B to make money. And by the way, if you don’t care about that marginal edge, then by all means you should use a type A solution. But you should at least know the difference and make that choice deliberately.
My forecast is that, once the hype wave of big data is dead and gone, there will emerge reasonable standards of what a data scientist should actually be able to do, and moreover a standard of when and how to hire a good one. It’ll be a rubrik, and possibly some tests, of both problem solving and communication.
Personally, I’m looking forward to a more reasonable and realistic vision of how data and data expertise can help with things. I might have to change my job title, but I’m used to it.
Book Club for Occupy Finance (#OWS)
We in Alternative Banking are pretty proud of our book Occupy Finance, and we’re planning on having a book club associated with it.
The idea is for the author of each chapter to come and lead a discussion about the subject in that chapter. We expect the feedback to improve the topic and be incorporated into the 2nd edition of the book.
Where: The book club will meet from 2-3pm on the Sundays mentioned below, before the regular Alternative Banking meeting, in Room 402 or 409 of the International Affairs Building of Columbia University at Amsterdam and 118th.
Here’s the schedule:
Occupy Finance Book Club Schedule
Awesome press for Occupy Finance #OWS
Yesterday was pretty amazing, in spite of the fact that we realized a page was missing from the book. The missing page, which was supposed to be between pages 38 and 39, is available here.
UPDATE: the online version of Occupy Finance is now complete.
Hey, but it’s still a great book, and we got lots of fantastic press. Here’s the list so far:
- FT Alphaville with Lisa Pollack
- NPR with Margot Adler
- Bloomberg with Matt Levine
- New York Times with William Alden
- Daily Kos with medicalquack
We also got a nice mention on occupy.com and a preview from member Jerry Ashton on his Huffington Post blog.
Thank you guys!
And readers, if you really want a copy of the book, send me email with your address. Our group meeting this Sunday will consist of an envelope-stuffing party. My email address is on my “About” page.
Woohoo!
Happy Birthday, Occupy Wall Street! #OWS
Hey, what are you doing for the 2nd anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park?
I know what I’m doing, namely going down to the park and handing out hundreds of copies of my occupy group’s new book – now on scribd!!. Here’s a ridiculous gif of the pile of books that came from the printer yesterday with my kindergartner posing by it (you might need to click on it to see the animation!!):
Someone isn’t shy.
I’m also planning a small speech at 10:15am, which I’m still writing. I’ll post it here later. here it is:
Thank you for coming
Thank you for occupying
I am here today to announce a birth
The birth of a book
It’s called “Occupy Finance”
We wrote it
we are Alternative BankingWho are we?
We are a working group of Occupy
we first met almost two years ago
we have been meeting ever since
we meet every Sunday afternoon
at Columbia University
our meetings are totally open
we want you to comeWe discuss the financial system
we discuss financial regulation
we discuss how lobbyists destroy regulation
we discuss how Obama destroys regulation
we discuss what we can do to help
how we can make our opinions known
how we can make the system work for us
the 99%Last year we had a project
The 52 Shades of Greed
we came here to Zuccotti Park
we gave out hundreds of packs of cards
they explained the financial system
they called out the criminals
they called out the toxic ideas
and the toxic instruments
and the toxic institutions
that started this messThis year we’ve come back
with another present to share
it’s a book we wrote
it’s a book for all of us
it explains how the financial system works
and how it doesn’t work
it explains how the system uses us
how the bankers scam us all
how the regulators fail to do their job
how the politicians have been boughtWhy did we write this book?
we wrote it for you
and we wrote it for us
we wrote it for anyone
who wants to know
how to argue against
the side of greed
the side of corruption
the side of entitlementlet me tell you something
some people call us radicals
but listen up
when the top 1%
capture 95% of the income gains
since the so-called end
of the recession,
when more than half the country thinks
that we didn’t do enough
to put bankers in jail,
when the median household income
has gone down 7.3% since 2007,
when the actual employment rate
is 5% below 2007,
when the jobs that do exist are crappy
when we get paid with prepaid debit cards
that nickel and dime us all
then what we demand is not radical
it is only a system that works
we are asking for a just system
we are asking for a fair system
we are asking for an end to too-big-to-fail
we demand banks take less risk
with our money
and we are asking lawmakers
to stop banks
once and for all
from scamming people because they are poorPlease join us
we want you to come
you don’t need to be an expert
we started out as strangers
who wanted to know how things work
we have become friends
we have become allies
we have made something
out of our curiousity
and out of our hard work
and we are here today
to share that with you
and to ask you to join us
please join us
happy birthday to us!
Thank you!!
Happy Larry Summers isn’t the Fed Chair Day! #OWS
So yesterday there I was with my Occupy group, we’d just gone over our plans for the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street this coming Tuesday. We talked over releasing our book and the press conference in Zuccotti Park at 10:15am. We talked over the group’s web presence and how we had to improve it a bit before then, what flyers to hand out with the book, and how to get everyone copies of the book before then. In other words, logistics.
Then we turned to the content of the meeting, namely working on our op-ed focused on Larry Summers and why he shouldn’t be named the Fed Chair.
We’d brainstormed about it last week, and I put together a crappy first draft, and then another in our group had blown away my milquetoast logical argument with a couple of paragraphs of pure Occupy outrage. We were thinking about how to combine them, and we were also trying to decide whether to come up with a list of better candidates or just say “anyone would be better than Larry Summers.”
All of a sudden, someone in our group, who had been browsing the web in search for better candidates, suddenly interjects that “Larry Summers has withdrawn from consideration for the Fed job!”
That’s some good fucking karma.
And yes, it’s a pretty awesome moment when exactly what you’re working towards comes true like that, even if it’s only one thing on a very long list.
Here’s the next thing on the list: Too Big To Fail needs to end, people. Someone named Scott Cahoon sent me a video regarding that very topic last night which advertises his book called “Too Big Has Failed,” available on Amazon.
p.s. also, it’s been 5 years since the crisis, and not enough has changed.
Learning accounting
There are lots of things I know nothing at all about. It annoys me not to understand a subject at all, because it often means I can’t follow a conversation that I care about. The list includes, just as a start: accounting, law, and politics.
Of those three, accounting seems like the easiest thing to tackle by far. This is partly because the space between what it’s theoretically supposed to be and how it’s practiced is smaller than with law or politics. Or maybe the kind of tricks accountants use seem closer to the kind of tricks I know about from being a quant, so that space seems easier to navigate for me personally.
Anyway, I might be wrong, but my impression is that my lack of understanding of accounting is mostly a language barrier, rather than a conceptual problem. There are expenses, and revenue, and lots of tax issues. There are categories. I’m working on the assumption that none of this stuff is exactly mathematical either, it’s all about knowing what things are called. And I don’t know any of it.
So I just signed up to learn at least some of it on a free Coursera course from the Wharton MBA Foundation Series. Here’s the introductory video, the professor seems super nerdy and goofy, which is a good start.
So in my copious free time I’ll be watching videos explaining the language of tax deferment and the like. Or at least that’s the fantasy – the thing about Coursera is that it’s free, so there’s not much incentive to keep up with the course. And the fact that all four Wharton 1st-year courses are being given away for free is proof of something, by the way – possibly that what you’re really paying for in business school is the connections you make while you’re there.
Aunt Pythia’s advice
You know what’s awesome? I’ll tell you what’s awesome.
What’s awesome is waking up on Saturday and knowing it’s time to crack open the Aunt Pythia Google Doc and see what juicy ethical dilemmas there are to ponder. I live for this stuff, peoples! Thank you for offering your most intimate conundrums for me to rip open and expose to the world! I do appreciate it.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.
But most importantly, Submit your question for Aunt Pythia at the bottom of this page!
——
Dear Auntie Py,
I keep thinking of starting my own blog about my favorite ten things: data, small tricks, visualization, things that fly, you know … But I am so immersed in the 10+ great blogs out there (mathbabe to mention one), that I keep consuming and enjoying, and never get around to sitting down and producing.
What do you think is a healthy balance of reading what awesome people have to say and trying to add one’s own two cents out there? Is it ever possible to do both seriously and thoroughly?
It would be most helpful, if you could also extend your wisdom to academic publications.
May your readers grow exponentially.
Be Your Own True CHaracter
Dear BYOTCH,
Confession: I don’t regularly read anyone else’s blog. I spend quite a bit of time on Naked Capitalism, and I have historically spent quite a bit of time on Dealbreaker, although now that Matt Levine has moved to Bloomberg I am enjoying him there.
I also regularly check out a bunch of blogs, including my friend Jordan’s blog Quomodocumque, even though it’s impossible to spell. But let’s put it this way: I wasn’t aware of the moment that Google Reader disappeared, because I don’t need a reader for the kind of reading I do.
Not that I don’t read. I do read, a lot, and one way I do is I follow people on Twitter who use it like I do, mainly to post interesting links. That way I get to read all sorts of things from all sorts of sources. Also, I enjoy getting links from my readers and friends through email or chat.
So I guess my answer is, it’s just as important to diversify your reading than it is to balance reading and writing. As for writing, go here for more advice.
As for the seriously/ thoughtfully thing: don’t try too hard. In fact, the key is to have exactly one idea and write about it. If you try to have more than one idea it will be too long, too complicated, or both.
Finally, as for the academic writing: same answer. I think I wrote as many papers as I read, which is to say I didn’t read all that many papers. I mostly learned math through talking to people directly about their work and through going to talks, and early on through classes and homework. But that’s a personality thing, everyone’s different.
Good luck!
Aunt Py
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Somewhere along the line I thankfully transitioned away from seeking advice. I no longer feel any need whatsoever to seek advice on anything major, ever, as the data is now in: nobody is better at advising me than myself.
In fact I would take this a level further by declaring that any compulsion to seek advice itself represents a bigger problem than whatever one might feel the need to be asking for advice about!
My fence position on giving advice is commensurate with the above, but hey, if it makes for juicy reading, why not! 🙂
Loopy Not
Dear Loopy,
Putting aside the fact that you filled out an advice form to object to the concept of advice giving, I totally agree with you. I’d put it another way though. Often, when people think they have a question about topic A, in asking it they expose that they have a much greater need to be advised on topic B, and topic B is usually something like “how do I make important life decisions?”.
Put it another way. Religious readers of Aunt Pythia may have noticed that she consistently offers advice akin to “think for yourself!” at the rate of every second week or so. You might imagine that this means Aunt Pythia wishes her job weren’t giving advice at all, but that is false. In fact, Aunt Pythia loves her job, and wants to help people, but she often considers the best way to help is to answer the question that nobody thought to ask.
So if someone’s asking a question that they should answer themselves (“should I marry this woman that I love dearly even though so-and-so doesn’t think it will work out?”) the answer isn’t directed at the question, the answer is directed at the question of what it means to have free will.
That’s a more important and universal question anyway, and moreover talking it over in a nurturing and thoughtful environment is not a useless exercise: people have been known to emerge courageous and determined from such conversations, and they go forth boldly and make the decisions they already should have been making.
Finally, to address your defiant position on advice-giving. Putting aside the fact that you’ve given me advice on never giving advice, I will defend my occupation thus: some people get something from advice, other people ignore it. Feel free to ignore it.
Yours,
Aunt Pythia
——
Hi Babe,
I am a junior faculty in a university you know. Last semester I had an undergrad in my class who had (and still has) a crush on me. The feeling is mutual, but she chose to take another course with me, so our flirtation has gone nowhere. I am afraid that she will ask to supervise her senior thesis, which I could but don’t want to do. Instead, I want to pursue a relationship with her. Should I take her to coffee and explain my predicament?
Sad in Downtown
Dear Sad,
Hands off, buddy. You don’t know what kind of crush she has one you – it could very well be an intellectual crush, and she could be taking another course with the reasonable expectation of writing a senior thesis with you. In other words, she’s investing her time and scholarly energy into this relationship, and it’s simply not fair to her academic career for you to throw that all away because you want to get into her pants.
Think about it this way. Let’s say some man took two classes from you, and say you went out to coffee with that man to tell him you can’t do a senior thesis with him but you’d love to be his basketball buddy.
Would that be reasonable? No, it wouldn’t. And that’s the smell test here. You can’t derail her intellectual investment just because she happens to be attractive.
As for the flirting, it’s possible she does have a crush on you, but it’s also possible that she’s just psyched to get attention from a professor, and the power differential makes her willing to take that attention in any form she can. So don’t get too high on it, it’s called power.
My advice: don’t make a move on her, be her advisor, and be her advocate. If it’s meant to be then she’ll come to your office someday after she graduates, when she’s no longer at your mercy, and she’ll tell you she’s interested as one adult talks to another. But even then it’s gotta come from her.
Finally, you might want to reread the papers you signed when you took this job. They’re not window dressing.
Aunt Pythia
——
Dear Aunt Pythia,
Today, I had a substitute teacher in my linear algebra class. As he walked in, it was as if Gandalf had appeared to lead his hobbits to their destinies. Grey bearded, tall, hunched, and with an almost accusing nose as he peered out expectantly, he wielded those matrices with the ease of someone who had defeated vectors from as far away as Eigen to the East and series from Fourier to the South. As much as he was intimidating he was also reassuring in his insistence that not only could we understand the material, but that our quest was a righteous one. My question is, as a math major soon to graduate (hopefully) without any specific plans, where is my ring to toss in Mount Doom?
Love your posts!
Looking for Mount Doom
Dear Looking for Mount Doom,
You know how, when you’re an uber nerd from an uber nerd family, all those nerdy books and movies kind of make no sense to you because you’ve seen them since you were 4 and you just weren’t capable of deconstructing stuff and interpreting stuff when you were 4?
Well, your question has forced me to think about the meaning of the ring, and of Mount Doom, and who Gandalf was, and who Frodo was, and try to understand the extent to which we are all Frodos, and we each have our own ring to throw into our personal Mount Dooms, and I gotta tell you, I got nothing.
However, if I might shift the frame just a wee bit, and suggest that your linear algebra sub was probably actually Obi Wan Kenobi, not Gandalf, then this one’s easy: go find yourself a Yoda (thesis advisor) and learn how to use the force (of mathematics). And remember: there is no try, only do.
Good luck,
Auntie P
——
Before I end today’s column, I’ve got something to share with you, but only if you’re ready for it.
If you’re in a spicy mood on this Saturday morning, please check out a new advice blog my anonymous friend sent me. It’s called Never Sleep Alone, and it contains lots of wisdom about sex and dating, albeit couched in a ridiculously macho, possibly satirical (but possibly not) framework, especially in this post entitled Why You Suck And What To Do About It.
In other words, the advice is good, not all the assumptions are.
——
Please submit your well-specified, fun-loving, cleverly-abbreviated question to Aunt Pythia!
Movie Review: Network
I watched Network last night on the advice of my friends in Occupy. More like insistence than advice, actually: they claimed I absolutely needed to see it, that it would blow me away with its prescience and wisdom.
Turns out they were absolutely right.
Here’s the thing, though. Given that Network was released in 1977, I’m hesitant to even suggest to young people today (defined as: younger than me) that they watch it because they it’s so true, its predictions are so spot-on accurate, that anyone who wasn’t alive in 1977 might not – probably cannot – appreciate how incredible it must have seemed back then. It might even seem boring to someone who is used to a world of Fox News and the internet’s filter bubble.
Then again, that’s not entirely true. It’s not just an amazing prediction about what TV and society would turn into. The other strength of the movie is that it keeps changing, in a mostly painful but sometimes hilarious way, from scene to scene, subplot to subplot, and that keeps it from being about just one idea or just one person.
A particularly powerful scene of a jilted wife really got to me, and even though the movie isn’t particularly about that relationship, the movie manages to make it work.
And the most ridiculous scene, which involves two revolutionary groups reading over a contract with a crowd of network lawyers, might also be the most convincingly depressing: we might have our own particular emotional and political issues and rebellions, but we are all cowed by the power of money.
If you wanted to force Network to be about one thing in particular, it would have to be an argument concerning the role of the individual in the modern world. Here’s the protagonist, Howard Beale, preaching to his television audience from this YouTube clip of Network:
… when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this tube?
So, listen to me! Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park, that’s what television is! Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats and story-tellers, singers and dancers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business!
If you want truth, go to God, go to your guru, go to yourself because that’s the only place you’ll ever find any real truth! But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us.
We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We’ll tell you Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry: just look at your watch — at the end of the hour, he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear!
We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people sit there — all of you — day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds — we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe this illusion we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal.
You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs!
In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We’re the illusions! So turn off this goddam set! Turn it off right now! Turn it off and leave it off. Turn it off right now, right in the middle of this very sentence I’m speaking now.”
After a while, the head of the news corporation decides he’s had enough of Beale’s message and decides to give him the corporation’s perspective on the discussion. From this YouTube clip:
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale!
It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children, Mr. Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war and famine, oppression and brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.
What’s incredible about Network is that, until possibly the last 2 minutes, none of it seems particularly unrealistic. It’s satire that rings so true that it manages to avoid the standard skeptical or baffled response. And although it is not uplifting, Network is incredibly thought-provoking and current.
Finally, the movie also has some show-biz advice for anyone trying to communicate a message. Namely, being consistently depressing and apocalyptic gets old, even if there’s an element of truth to it. It’s critical to balance that with hope about the power of individual action, sprinkled with outrage and impulsive energy.
Interactive scoring models: why hasn’t this happened yet?
My friend Suresh just reminded me about this article written a couple of years ago by Malcolm Gladwell and published in the New Yorker.
It concerns various scoring models that claim to be both comprehensive (which means it covers the whole thing, not just one aspect of the thing) and heterogeneous (which means it is broad enough to cover all things in a category), say for cars or for colleges.
Weird things happen when you try to do this, like not caring much about price or exterior detailing for sports cars.
Two things. First, this stuff is actually really hard to do well. I like how Gladwell addresses this issue:
At no point, however, do the college guides acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of the task they have set themselves.
Second of all, I think the issue of combining heterogeneity and comprehensiveness is addressable, but it has to be addressed interactively.
Specifically, what if instead of a single fixed score, there was a place where a given car-buyer or college-seeker could go to fill out a form of preferences? For each defined and rated aspect, the user would fill answer a question about how much they cared about that aspect. They’d assign a weight to each aspect. A given question would look something like this:
For colleges, some people care a lot about whether their college has a ton of alumni giving, other people care more about whether the surrounding town is urban or rural. Let’s let people create their own scoring system. It’s technically easy.
I’ve suggested this before when I talked about rating math articles on various dimensions (hard, interesting, technical, well-written) and then letting people come and search based on weighting those dimensions and ranking. But honestly we can start even dumber, with car ratings and college ratings.
mathbabe 