Inspiring Meta-Math Answer

I chanced upon Alon Amit's amazing answer on Quora to the question:

I am not amazingly good at maths, so it is obvious to me whether I can solve a problem or not after 5 minutes. How do people spend hours on problems?

He paints a beautiful problem, which is easy to describe, and which anyone can have fun with. You should check it out.

One of the bad misconceptions people have about math problem solving is that it’s a mechanical process: either you know which algorithm to follow, in which case just fucking follow it and be done with it, or you don’t, in which case there’s nothing you can do.

On the Political Economy

Many people are not thrilled with the choices available this year's presidential election cycle. Given our moribund Congress, it is easy to get pessimistic.

However, I've been reading a number of interesting proposals to fix the deadlock in our political system.

1. Howards Marks on "Political Reality" (pdf)

I find his take compelling. I think "moderate" and "compromise" are positive words/attributes. Towards the end of the document Marks offers some prescriptions for where to begin. The proposal try to make it easier for moderates, and centrists to win elections.

2. Terry Moe on EconTalk...

... offers a different diagnosis, and a radically different medicine: a stronger presidency.

With some exceptions, Congress has never been capable of crafting effective policy responses to the nation’s problems, a fact that is well documented. Polarization has made a bad situation worse, but it is not the underlying cause of Congress’s core inadequacies—which are baked into the institution and not of recent vintage. Congress is an ineffective policymaker because it is wired to be that way by the Constitution, whose design ensures that legislators are electorally tied to their local jurisdictions and highly responsive to special interests. Congress is not wired to solve national problems in the national interest. It is wired to allow hundreds of parochial legislators to promote their own political welfare through special-interest politics.

Linear Algebra Insights

3Blue1Brown has a wonderful new series on the "Essence of Linear Algebra", where he visually explores fundamental topics in linear algebra.

Worth a watch!

Learning Regular Expressions

A really useful website to experiment and learn how regular expressions work.

You can cut and paste your text in the "Text" box, and try out various regular expressions.

The website also has a handy cheat sheet and examples, in addition to a comprehensive reference.

Conceptual Mathematics

Grant Wiggins has a very interesting post on "conceptual mathematics".

The list of 9 misconceptions in arithmetic and the challenge test with 13 questions for conceptual understanding both make for very interesting reading.

The first misconception he cites:

1. A number with three digits is always bigger than one with two
. Some children will swear blind that 3.24 is bigger than 4.6 because it’s got more digits. Why? Because for the first few years of learning, they only came across whole numbers, where the ‘digits’ rule does work.

And the first question in the challenge test:

1) “You can’t divide by zero.” Explain why not, (even though, of course, you can multiply by zero.)

Very nice read. 

Prisoner's Dilemma Game Show

You probably know all about the Prisoner's dilemma. If not, consider this wikipedia link.

Thanks to RadioLab, I found this amazing video:

Retirement of Scientific Ideas

The Edge has an interesting collection of scientific ideas that are ready for retirement (H/T Skeptic's Guide to the Universe).

As expected, it includes its fair share of straw men (ideas which are already dead or were never seriously considered in the scientific community), opinions with a bias induced by the author's competing theory, or some potential conflict of interest, and some truly thought provoking ones (especially in areas far removed from one's own scientific work/reading).

Anyway, the list has been around for a while (I bumped into it only recently). It is worth a read.

Wine Crying due to Tension

A beautiful video explaining the phenomenon of "crying wine" (via Jimmy Touma).

The demonstration with pepper and detergent was impressive. I had to impress my daughter with it.

Climate Science Resource

I found this resource page on Skeptical Science through the NY Skeptics podcast.

The nice part about the way the page is organized is that it tries to debunk "climate change denial" claims at two levels: a basic level that you could use to engage middle school kids (simplified explanations), and an intermediate-level that is like a scientific paper, and backed by more data, references, and nuance.

You should check it out.

Dangerous Code

Michael Lewis tells the chilling story of Sergey Aleynikov in Vanity Fair:

Then he explained what he knew, or thought he knew: in April 2009, Serge had accepted a job at a new high-frequency-trading shop called Teza Technologies, but had remained at Goldman for the next six weeks, until June 5, during which time he sent himself, through a so-called “subversion repository,” 32 megabytes of source code from Goldman’s high-frequency stock-trading system. The Web site Serge had used (which has the word “subversion” in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious. He also seemed to think it significant that Serge had used a site not blocked by Goldman Sachs, even after Serge tried to explain to him that Goldman did not block any sites used by its programmers, but merely blocked its employees from porn and social-media sites and suchlike. Finally, the F.B.I. agent wanted him to admit that he had erased his “bash history”—that is, the commands he had typed into his own Goldman computer keyboard. Serge tried to explain why he had done this, but McSwain had no interest in his story. “The way he did it seemed nefarious,” the F.B.I. agent would later testify. [Emphasis mine]

Wikipedia has some additional details on this extremely bizarre case, which I just don't seem to get!

Academic Career Advice

Radhika Nagpal dishes out some very sensible advice that is not dished out as often as it should be.

In 2004 when I came to Harvard as a junior faculty, I wrote it on my desk. This-is-a-7-year-postdoc.
I type it in every day. For all seven+ years I have been at Harvard. No joke. 

It is an incredibly liberating point of view. If I’m not here for tenure, then there are a bunch of things I do not need to do. For example, I don’t need to spend my seventh year travelling doing the tenure talk circuit (I did not do this), or make sure I invite and get to know personally exactly 18 folks who might be my letter writers, or be on organizing committees so everyone important knows me well, or try to get nominated for awards as fast and as young as possible (I just turned 42). Frankly most of this is not possible to actually do!

HFT in decline?

Interesting story entitled "How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall" in BusinessWeek on how speed is becoming increasingly commoditized!

For the first time since its inception, high-frequency trading, the bogey machine of the markets, is in retreat. According to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, as much as two-thirds of all stock trades in the U.S. from 2008 to 2011 were executed by high-frequency firms; today it’s about half. In 2009, high-frequency traders moved about 3.25 billion shares a day. In 2012, it was 1.6 billion a day. Speed traders aren’t just trading fewer shares, they’re making less money on each trade. Average profits have fallen from about a tenth of a penny per share to a twentieth of a penny.

Interview with Popular Science Writers

Interesting interview with five popular science writers.

Here is an interesting part of the conversation. I've highlighted parts of Pinker's (SP) response that I liked. I've kept Brian Green's (BG) response in there, because it sets the context.

I've heard it being called the "file drawer problem" because all the failures are stowed away.

How has the formal, technical way scientists write journal papers affected popular science writing? 
BG: I was looking back over some quantum mechanics papers from the 1920s and in one article the scientist described an accident in his laboratory when a glass tube exploded, a nickel got tarnished and he heated it to get rid of the tarnish – he went through the whole story himself in the technical article. You don't really see that much these days. I don't know if that is a one-off example, I haven't done an exhaustive study, but have journal articles moved away from telling the story of discovery to just a more cut-and-dried approach?  

SP: They have; I think that's been documented. There is scientifically a problem with that, as opposed to narrating what happened. The problem is that since you're under pressure from the journal editor to tell your story leading up to your conclusion without talking about all the blind alleys and accidents, it actually distorts the story itself because it inflates the probability that what you discovered is really significant. If you tried 15 things that didn't work and one thing that did work and didn't talk about the 15 that didn't work, then the statistic that makes it significant is actually mistaken. The statistic has to be computed over all of the experiments you ran, not just the one that happened to work. In the social sciences especially, we're seeing that there's a lot of damage done by the practice of only reporting the successes and telling the story as if it was a straight line to a successful result.

Correlation and Causation

Saw this funny chart on FlowingData:

which reminded me of "Correlation with causation = science; correlation without causation = superstition."

Here are some more correlation-causation comics.

EconTalk Podcasts and More

I stumbled upon EconTalk podcasts earlier this year, and have been hooked. I find myself listening to these fascinating long-form (~1 hour) discussions on various "economic" topics with intellectual leaders while exercising, driving, doing dishes etc.

The whole discussion, while being in a question-answer format, is not really an "interview" in the Charlie Rose sense. The focus is more on the topic, and less on the person.

Here is the description of the program from the website:

The Library of Economics and Liberty carries a weekly podcast, EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts. The talk show features one-on-one discussions with an eclectic mix of authors, professors, Nobel Laureates, entrepreneurs, leaders of charities and businesses, and people on the street. The emphases are on using topical books and the news to illustrate economic principles. Exploring how economics emerges in practice is a primary theme. 

The quality of the discussions in the forum is quite extraordinary.

Links: People Edition

1. Are Steve Job's shoes too big to fill? Perhaps not for Tim Cook, who is rebuilding Apple in his image.

What's clear is that Cook is behaving like his own man, putting his stamp on Apple -- including some moves that will court controversy with the Apple faithful, watchful as they are for the slightest deviation from their perception of the Steve Jobs playbook. Cook consistently pays homage to the legacy of Jobs, but he doesn't apologize for charting a new course. He seems, at the end of the day, to be honoring one of Jobs' dying requests: that Apple's management not ask "What would Steve do?" and instead do what's best for Apple.

2. Walter Issacson on Benjamin Franklin (video)

Soft and Hard Sciences

Interesting opinion in the NYT "Overcoming Physics Envy" (H/T Bridging Differences), trying to argue why the "hypothetico-deductivism" of the physical sciences may not be the best strategy in social sciences.

A more important criticism is that theoretical models can be of great value even if they are never supported by empirical testing. In the 1950s, for instance, the economist Anthony Downs offered an elegant explanation for why rival political parties might adopt identical platforms during an election campaign. His model relied on the same strategic logic that explains why two competing gas stations or fast-food restaurants locate across the street from each other — if you don’t move to a central location but your opponent does, your opponent will nab those voters (customers). The best move is for competitors to mimic each other. 

This framework has proven useful to generations of political scientists even though Mr. Downs did not empirically test it and despite the fact that its main prediction, that candidates will take identicalpositions in elections, is clearly false. The model offered insight into why candidates move toward the center in competitive elections, and it proved easily adaptable to studying other aspects of candidate strategies. But Mr. Downs would have had a hard time publishing this model today.

To borrow a metaphor from the philosopher of science Ronald Giere, theories are like maps: the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere.