8 ms·

What programmers can learn from economists: fundamentals and models

65 points by ash 11y ago

carsongross 11y ago
> "No one predicted this." Memorize this phrase. > Government jobs are very stable. > Apply math to all problems, regardless of the appropriateness. When two theories are in conflict, the one with more math wins, unless it conflicts with the interests of the people who are paying you. > Normal distributions. Everywhere.
- KingMob 11y ago
  Are those quotes? They're not in the linked article.
abc_lisper 11y ago
Agreed. Where do I signup? What concrete steps should I take to break this cycle?
- Absentinsomniac 11y ago
  Presumably we have to make access to historic CS papers more readily available and research past implementations of concepts before diving in, and what not. This seems sensible. Probably very few programmers actually check the literature before doing anything. Online maybe, but a good deal of the scientific papers in the field are paywalled etc. I don't even know what fundamentals besides basic ideas of programming might look like.
  - abc_lisper 11y ago
    You mean, like this? http://paperswelove.org/ http://paperswelove.org/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
suyash 11y ago
It's just a rant with very few valid points. First of all the author is confusing the readers by not making it clear the distinction between writing code as a hobbyist programmer vs writing code like a Computer Scientist. Computer Science first of all is more science than Economics. Theories in computer science have mathematical proofs behind them, the arguments he is making seem to be based on programming design patterns like Abstraction and so forth which are of course always debatable.
- DickingAround 11y ago
  Full agree; especially on comp-sci being far harder of a science than economics. The author seems to be making the opposite case, for example based on how there are not labeled 'schools of through'. I would argue these schools of thought are good for structuring debate but don't make economics into a science. Furthermore, it's very easy to dispel the author's idea that 'learning to code' is not a worthwhile goal or even that there's serious risk if the public confuses learning to code with computer science. To give a correlary, if you teach someone to weld no one will confuse them with a master metallurgist and machinist. I think the world will understand the difference between a novice programmer and a master programmer. The risk here is low. And thus the rant is not terribly valuable.
  - alosarv 11y ago
    I think that assumption is incorrect. Looking at the multitude of posts on "why can't programmers program"[1] (in the sense of not having solid fundamentals) and the difficulty of finding, let alone having an interview process that is reliable able to identify them, I would say there is a large amount of confusion distinguishing those who can weld and master metallurgists. People can spend a decade or more in the industry as working "programmers" and fail at writing FizzBuzz, let alone understanding basic relational theory or how a their chosen stack works. And then we try to patch it over with more tooling or new languages that are supposed to be less error-prone or somehow magically allow us to build out programming teams out of coders rather than teach them solid CS fundamentals and sound development practices. The problem is that to someone not trained in a craft, even a beginner would appear to be able to perform that craft; only someone with deep(er) understanding of metallurgy would be able to recognize that said welder has no idea of what they're doing and is just following a set scripted actions; what's more harmful is that said beginner is lulled into believing they are actually an expert whereas they're really an Expert Beginner[2]. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [2] http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of...
HillaryBriss 11y ago
... appears to have been written by an economist. Is any other comment necessary?
- cwyers 11y ago
  I am pretty sure it was written by vezzy-fnord, whose other postings on HN do not lead me to believe he's an economist.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  Definitely not by an economist. Statements like > Economics is divided into many schools, in turn leaning neoclassical, heterodox or other are a pretty big tipoff because 1: non "heterodox" economists do not care enough about heterodox economics to mention it as a "school." 2: "heterodox" economists almost certainly don't think that "more formal math, like mainstream economics" is a good recommendation for any field. (I am an economist, don't agree with the article.)
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I didn't refer to "heterodox" as a school, but rather a higher taxonomic rank. Nor did I ever make the case for formal math specifically. It is true I am not an economist.
    - grayclhn 11y ago
      I just meant that an economist would have written differently in a lot of ways orthogonal to the point you were making. I didn't mean it as a value judgement (i.e. that an economist would have written it better), even though my post might have been read that way.
platz 11y ago
> The entrepreneurial hacker and the MIT-style hacker are two different beasts subtle reference to https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
pdkl95 11y ago
At the end[1] of the talk[2] at 30c3 by Eleanor Saitta and Quinn Norton, "No Neutral Ground in a Burning World", an audience member suggested that people need spend time learning basic historical knowledge about crypto. It disturbs me that there are books about cryptographic algorithms, there are books about early days of hacking, but I talk to people younger than myself who are in their teens and twenties, and from the people I've talked to there is an astounding lack of awareness of say, the first crypto war. That's bad enough, but Quinn's reply is a simple, easy to understand, damning indictment of the sorry state of the modern software culture: Can everybody in the room who has some sort of computer science degree or related degree put up your hand? Keep your hands up. Now, everyone who read Claude Shannon in school put your hands down. So all of you are people with CS degrees who didn't read Claude Shannon, one of the most fundamental voices in everything you do. Unfortunately, learning from history takes effort, so it's a lot easier to simply cargo-cult programming "knowledge" instead of actually learning about these complex systems. > economists They have their own problems with over-reliance on models. Mark Blyth's description of the problem from the perspective from inside the field has quite a few similarities to the problems in programming. > models On the subject of over-reliance on models - especially overly-complicated, buzzword-compliant models that cover up a total lack of actual research, innovation, or really anything worthwhile at all - I want to suggest listening[4] to the wonderful Tom Lehrer talk about Sociology. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE#t=2367 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE#t=2367 [2] http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burning-world/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So#t=37 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So#t=37
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Well, the entire point of Math is that you don't need to learn history to use and improve it. Yes, you can learn a bit from history, but it's very limited, and too specific to help in most situations. And before you ask, I've read Shannon, and Hamming. Didn't read CS Turing papers (did read some others), and I guess there's no further information there that I don't know already. I've also read about the first crypto wars, and quite a lot about economics - enough to know this article is complete bullshit; the author complains that developers don't practice the most damaging practices of economists. Besides, get me a keynesianist that has read Keynes. If you came complaining that people mostly lack basic mathematical knowledge about crypto, and don't know the best practices about software architecture, I'd completely agree. I'll also agree that history is a great tool for making the mathematical and anedonctal knowledge easier to digest. But no, it's not very valuable by itself.
yarrel 11y ago
It's not called the dismal science for nothing.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  It's called the dismal science because a slavery proponent disliked the abolitionist conclusions of economists.
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    That reminds me of the thing about how Chicago was originally called "The Windy City" because of all the political gossip rather than the actual wind. That may be true, but it's also super windy there, which is more relevant for the nickname in contemporary parlance. But thanks, I didn't know that, and it's super interesting!
ilaksh 11y ago
Why can't I downvote posts? This is a baseless attack on programmers. He just claims that we can't reason. Its obviously bullshit (colorful language intended and warranted). I personally think economics may not be a science at all, since it is mainly based on models with very little physical evidence to back them up. Which I would hesitate to make a statement like that, or a rant with many of them, because obviously it is unfair and offensive to economists.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  I wouldn't call that view "unfair and offensive to economists," just not super original or useful. There are huge financial and societal rewards to producing "better economics" than we have now (i.e., you'd do the world a lot of good and get paid a lot of money) so if you have specific improvements in mind, please please please try to work on them.
AC__ 11y ago
Economics is pseudo-science. I refuse to recognize a man made construct as a valid scientific field. I used to argue with my BBA room-mate, I asserted markets were fixed, he would try to counter with law of demand. HA! Libor scandal, crude prices, utility price fixing honestly I could go on for days.
- crzwdjk 11y ago
  So computer science is a pseudo-science too?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kazagistar 11y ago
    Computer Science isn't even a science most of the time.
  - AlphaSite 11y ago
    CS is an intersection of arts, science, engineering and maths. The algorithms and data structures are the maths and science side, HCI is the arts/social sciences portion and of course applications, teams management etc are more where it intersects with engineering. HCI is a less grounded than the maths portions which are as much a science as any part of maths is. But still have a grounding. The engineering side is probably a lot more wishy-washy and concerned with anecdotes than empirical evidence. That's my opinion as a generalisation.
- kazagistar 11y ago
  Behavioral Biology is a science, pretty sure about that one. Sociology is a study of the behavior of a particular animal, humans. Economics is a study of a particular type of human behavior. Economics is just a very specialized science.
- aeneasreid 11y ago
  You should read more economics instead of just assuming it is what assholes and BBAs do. Al Roth's work on making kidney exchanges function well for example. Economics is a big field. You probably just disagree with the intro classes which admittedly are dumbed way down to "supply and demand"
laxatives 11y ago
Maybe not a primary component of economics, but its sad how little statistics is a part of CS. Dealing with things at scale makes statistics/probability integral and many of the most interesting ML algorithms don't come from CS backgrounds, but from statistics (Random Forests) and Convex Optimization (EE/Math).
- grayclhn 11y ago
  I'd like it to be a bigger part of economics training, but most econ majors have about a year of formal statistics/econometrics as a year of their coursework.

65 points by ash 11y ago

> "No one predicted this." Memorize this phrase. > Government jobs are very stable. > Apply math to all problems, regardless of the appropriateness. When two theories are in conflict, the one with more math wins, unless it conflicts with the interests of the people who are paying you. > Normal distributions. Everywhere.

KingMob 11y ago
Are those quotes? They're not in the linked article.

abc_lisper 11y ago

Agreed. Where do I signup? What concrete steps should I take to break this cycle?

Absentinsomniac 11y ago
Presumably we have to make access to historic CS papers more readily available and research past implementations of concepts before diving in, and what not. This seems sensible. Probably very few programmers actually check the literature before doing anything. Online maybe, but a good deal of the scientific papers in the field are paywalled etc. I don't even know what fundamentals besides basic ideas of programming might look like.
- abc_lisper 11y ago
  You mean, like this? http://paperswelove.org/ http://paperswelove.org/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

suyash 11y ago

It's just a rant with very few valid points. First of all the author is confusing the readers by not making it clear the distinction between writing code as a hobbyist programmer vs writing code like a Computer Scientist. Computer Science first of all is more science than Economics. Theories in computer science have mathematical proofs behind them, the arguments he is making seem to be based on programming design patterns like Abstraction and so forth which are of course always debatable.

DickingAround 11y ago
Full agree; especially on comp-sci being far harder of a science than economics. The author seems to be making the opposite case, for example based on how there are not labeled 'schools of through'. I would argue these schools of thought are good for structuring debate but don't make economics into a science. Furthermore, it's very easy to dispel the author's idea that 'learning to code' is not a worthwhile goal or even that there's serious risk if the public confuses learning to code with computer science. To give a correlary, if you teach someone to weld no one will confuse them with a master metallurgist and machinist. I think the world will understand the difference between a novice programmer and a master programmer. The risk here is low. And thus the rant is not terribly valuable.
- alosarv 11y ago
  I think that assumption is incorrect. Looking at the multitude of posts on "why can't programmers program"[1] (in the sense of not having solid fundamentals) and the difficulty of finding, let alone having an interview process that is reliable able to identify them, I would say there is a large amount of confusion distinguishing those who can weld and master metallurgists. People can spend a decade or more in the industry as working "programmers" and fail at writing FizzBuzz, let alone understanding basic relational theory or how a their chosen stack works. And then we try to patch it over with more tooling or new languages that are supposed to be less error-prone or somehow magically allow us to build out programming teams out of coders rather than teach them solid CS fundamentals and sound development practices. The problem is that to someone not trained in a craft, even a beginner would appear to be able to perform that craft; only someone with deep(er) understanding of metallurgy would be able to recognize that said welder has no idea of what they're doing and is just following a set scripted actions; what's more harmful is that said beginner is lulled into believing they are actually an expert whereas they're really an Expert Beginner[2]. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ [2] http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of...

HillaryBriss 11y ago

... appears to have been written by an economist. Is any other comment necessary?

cwyers 11y ago
I am pretty sure it was written by vezzy-fnord, whose other postings on HN do not lead me to believe he's an economist.
grayclhn 11y ago
Definitely not by an economist. Statements like > Economics is divided into many schools, in turn leaning neoclassical, heterodox or other are a pretty big tipoff because 1: non "heterodox" economists do not care enough about heterodox economics to mention it as a "school." 2: "heterodox" economists almost certainly don't think that "more formal math, like mainstream economics" is a good recommendation for any field. (I am an economist, don't agree with the article.)
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I didn't refer to "heterodox" as a school, but rather a higher taxonomic rank. Nor did I ever make the case for formal math specifically. It is true I am not an economist.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    I just meant that an economist would have written differently in a lot of ways orthogonal to the point you were making. I didn't mean it as a value judgement (i.e. that an economist would have written it better), even though my post might have been read that way.

platz 11y ago

> The entrepreneurial hacker and the MIT-style hacker are two different beasts subtle reference to https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

pdkl95 11y ago

At the end[1] of the talk[2] at 30c3 by Eleanor Saitta and Quinn Norton, "No Neutral Ground in a Burning World", an audience member suggested that people need spend time learning basic historical knowledge about crypto. It disturbs me that there are books about cryptographic algorithms, there are books about early days of hacking, but I talk to people younger than myself who are in their teens and twenties, and from the people I've talked to there is an astounding lack of awareness of say, the first crypto war. That's bad enough, but Quinn's reply is a simple, easy to understand, damning indictment of the sorry state of the modern software culture: Can everybody in the room who has some sort of computer science degree or related degree put up your hand? Keep your hands up. Now, everyone who read Claude Shannon in school put your hands down. So all of you are people with CS degrees who didn't read Claude Shannon, one of the most fundamental voices in everything you do. Unfortunately, learning from history takes effort, so it's a lot easier to simply cargo-cult programming "knowledge" instead of actually learning about these complex systems. > economists They have their own problems with over-reliance on models. Mark Blyth's description of the problem from the perspective from inside the field has quite a few similarities to the problems in programming. > models On the subject of over-reliance on models - especially overly-complicated, buzzword-compliant models that cover up a total lack of actual research, innovation, or really anything worthwhile at all - I want to suggest listening[4] to the wonderful Tom Lehrer talk about Sociology. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE#t=2367 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE#t=2367 [2] http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burning-world/ http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burn... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmWbkPezgtU [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So#t=37 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfZWyUXn3So#t=37

marcosdumay 11y ago
Well, the entire point of Math is that you don't need to learn history to use and improve it. Yes, you can learn a bit from history, but it's very limited, and too specific to help in most situations. And before you ask, I've read Shannon, and Hamming. Didn't read CS Turing papers (did read some others), and I guess there's no further information there that I don't know already. I've also read about the first crypto wars, and quite a lot about economics - enough to know this article is complete bullshit; the author complains that developers don't practice the most damaging practices of economists. Besides, get me a keynesianist that has read Keynes. If you came complaining that people mostly lack basic mathematical knowledge about crypto, and don't know the best practices about software architecture, I'd completely agree. I'll also agree that history is a great tool for making the mathematical and anedonctal knowledge easier to digest. But no, it's not very valuable by itself.

yarrel 11y ago

It's not called the dismal science for nothing.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
It's called the dismal science because a slavery proponent disliked the abolitionist conclusions of economists.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  That reminds me of the thing about how Chicago was originally called "The Windy City" because of all the political gossip rather than the actual wind. That may be true, but it's also super windy there, which is more relevant for the nickname in contemporary parlance. But thanks, I didn't know that, and it's super interesting!

ilaksh 11y ago

Why can't I downvote posts? This is a baseless attack on programmers. He just claims that we can't reason. Its obviously bullshit (colorful language intended and warranted). I personally think economics may not be a science at all, since it is mainly based on models with very little physical evidence to back them up. Which I would hesitate to make a statement like that, or a rant with many of them, because obviously it is unfair and offensive to economists.

grayclhn 11y ago
I wouldn't call that view "unfair and offensive to economists," just not super original or useful. There are huge financial and societal rewards to producing "better economics" than we have now (i.e., you'd do the world a lot of good and get paid a lot of money) so if you have specific improvements in mind, please please please try to work on them.

AC__ 11y ago

Economics is pseudo-science. I refuse to recognize a man made construct as a valid scientific field. I used to argue with my BBA room-mate, I asserted markets were fixed, he would try to counter with law of demand. HA! Libor scandal, crude prices, utility price fixing honestly I could go on for days.

crzwdjk 11y ago
So computer science is a pseudo-science too?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kazagistar 11y ago
  Computer Science isn't even a science most of the time.
- AlphaSite 11y ago
  CS is an intersection of arts, science, engineering and maths. The algorithms and data structures are the maths and science side, HCI is the arts/social sciences portion and of course applications, teams management etc are more where it intersects with engineering. HCI is a less grounded than the maths portions which are as much a science as any part of maths is. But still have a grounding. The engineering side is probably a lot more wishy-washy and concerned with anecdotes than empirical evidence. That's my opinion as a generalisation.
kazagistar 11y ago
Behavioral Biology is a science, pretty sure about that one. Sociology is a study of the behavior of a particular animal, humans. Economics is a study of a particular type of human behavior. Economics is just a very specialized science.
aeneasreid 11y ago
You should read more economics instead of just assuming it is what assholes and BBAs do. Al Roth's work on making kidney exchanges function well for example. Economics is a big field. You probably just disagree with the intro classes which admittedly are dumbed way down to "supply and demand"

laxatives 11y ago

Maybe not a primary component of economics, but its sad how little statistics is a part of CS. Dealing with things at scale makes statistics/probability integral and many of the most interesting ML algorithms don't come from CS backgrounds, but from statistics (Random Forests) and Convex Optimization (EE/Math).

grayclhn 11y ago
I'd like it to be a bigger part of economics training, but most econ majors have about a year of formal statistics/econometrics as a year of their coursework.