19 ms·

So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

394 points by luu 6y ago

mcnamaratw 6y ago
It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
- kbenson 6y ago
  I think there's actually two things going on here. There's what this post is talking about, which is a general lack of understanding of statistics, which is likely true and correct, and likely for both reasons that are explored here. Then there's the reason to actually even talk about this specific instance, which is that there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. Whether it's rampant on twitter and between political parties or has spilled into other areas such that it's harder to have coherent discussions in general now than it was in years past I'm not sure. There are a lot of assumptions in that reply to the tweet in question that's shown. It's not even a novel set of assumptions, it's the standard twitter fare of "I assume he means X and this thing doesn't explicitly show X therefore he must not understand what he's talking about." Any nuance such as using a secondary aspect of something to outline a potion of what you mean is immediately ignored, and if pointed out later assumed to be covering up after the fact.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Well, if you want to express nuance, Twitter might not be the medium for you...
    - kbenson 6y ago
      Lol, I believe that. The problem is that these days it seems like the message either has to be only visible by friendlies, or reduced to the simplest and rote version that's impossible to misinterpret if you want to avoid people trying to tear it apart, and even then they'll sometimes pull it into some wider framework of society and what it means when views through the lens of X, Y and Z and why you should be mad. That's a high bar to hit just to tweet something. It's crazy, and twitter's where it's easiest to see, but you can also use a news aggregator like news.google.com and get a good dose of it just from the headlines about what is ostensibly the same story from different news agencies. Wild times.
  - unishark 6y ago
    > ...there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. This is basically what all politics is. People projecting thoughts (or lack thereof) in bad faith on each other. Though it does seem that the fraction of society sucked into this toxic discourse has grown to cover practically everything lately (in the US anyway). But also the outrage machine of Twitter etc is obviously biased toward the extreme views and outliers. Where 99/100 people might say 'meh, another failure to predict the future like most', the remaining 1/100 blows his top and gets the attention.
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      For all the negativity out there, there is a lot more clarity in challenging bad interpretations. I havent learnt as much online recently as I have in 15 yrs on the net.
- smnthermes 6y ago
  The article may not have technical content, but the title certainly is true: http://pseudoexpertise.com/ http://pseudoexpertise.com/
  - thedudeabides5 6y ago
    Well the flame is saying it's a misunderstanding of the difference between data smoothing and model-based forecasting. To which I'd say that just begs the question of if there's a difference to begin with, and what criteria you would use to distinguish them if they are.
    - mcnamaratw 6y ago
      Of course there's a difference between smoothing and forecasting. It's the difference between interpolation and extrapolation. But I can't figure out what anyone in the original discussion is really saying, if anything.
    - dunkelheit 6y ago
      To begin, if the curve doesn't extend into the future, it can't forecast anything.
- Animats 6y ago
  Um, yes. The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good. This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
  - bradford 6y ago
    > The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. I'm curious how you concluded this. Can you (or anyone) recommend a reasoned evaluation of the existing models? We've got a few months of hindsight now and I'm curious hear what any reputable data scientist might have to say. I see criticism of the models online (in op-eds and social media), but the criticisms are usually agenda driven and opaque on technical details, which isn't particularly helpful.
    - Animats 6y ago
      The actuals from now and the predictions from a few weeks ago aren't aligning quantitatively. The shapes of the curves, though, do make sense. Here's the Financial Times graph of actuals, country by country.[1] No predictions. The pattern that shows up in some of the actuals is "huge spike, tight lockdown, big drop". See Italy, Belgium and the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man puts people in jail for weeks for violating quarantine rules. The US didn't have a huge spike, but isn't seeing a big drop, either. US deaths are at about 2/3 of peak. [1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnj&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&are...
  - cco 6y ago
    > This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno. This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.
- dunkelheit 6y ago
  > It's not clear what technical content this post has. Indeed. The post is a big exercise in strawmanning (and of course ad hominem but I am willing to forgive it because it adds entertainment value). Andrew Gelman (a well-known statistics expert) dunks on some guy because he dared to defend a shitty graphic and "made a statistical error". Which is kind of unfair, because he didn't do any statistics. Of course when our brains see some curves they can't resist the temptation to do some statistics on their own, but bad dataviz is a different sin than bad statistics and should be treated as such.
- starpilot 6y ago
  > A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...
  - dnautics 6y ago
    on the other hand, for reals calculus (namely taylor polynomial estimation) also says, "why not a cubic polynomial?"
    - CrazyStat 6y ago
      Because Taylor approximations can lose accuracy very quickly as you move away from the point they are centered around. There are available epidemiological models that are actually grounded in a scientific understanding of the problem. "Why not a cubic polynomial?" is a stupid question.
      - mcnamaratw 6y ago
        "Why not a cubic polynomial?" taken literally is not a stupid question at all. No, it's not a contribution to understanding the problem at the professional level, but it is a fundamental and important question. Somebody persists after hearing the answer (which you gave), that might be stupid.
      - dnautics 6y ago
        Yes, and until you do the correct analysis and estimate just how bad the estimate is going to be (off by 10%? Off by 50%? An order of magnitude?) You can't just dismiss it out of hand. So how far off will it be?
        CrazyStat 6y ago
        The cubic is going to go to either +infinity or -infinity, so it will eventually be of by infinity%. Or infinity orders of magnitude. I feel like I can dismiss it now.
- adfsdfs 6y ago
  I think it resembles a cubic spline kernel, FWIW.
  - mcnamaratw 6y ago
    Yeah that could be it. But in that case what's the big deal? The data is a messy bump on a log, the fit is a smooth bump on a log. That kind of fit is useless for prediction, but they say so explicitly.
dasudasu 6y ago
This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a way.
- threwawasy1228 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on this latter point further? I guess maybe I have impostor's syndrome but I have a hard time understanding how you could ever tell if you are that person or not. Imagine the following that I saw on a poker video recently: You have a table full of top-tier poker players and you have a rookie who won a contest to be in a game alongside them. The rookie is playing absolutely terrible, the commentators are cringing at the moves the rookie is making. The other players are clearly doing things to take advantage of the rookies playing style. Yet at the same time, the rookie comes out in 3rd place, up 50k from their buy in at the start of the night. 3 seasoned award winning professionals are all net-negative for the night, some of which are -150k from where they started after 150 hands played. Is this rookie an impostor or not? Does it matter that the rookie is an impostor if he is still beating people who verifiably are not impostors over the average of 150 separate hands? I guess all this is to say that I don't get what value using the impostor's syndrome framing gives us.
  - dasudasu 6y ago
    Poker is still a game of chance with beginner's luck being a thing. It's a quote from Buffett, relayed from poker folklore: As they say in poker, “If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”
- User23 6y ago
  It’s difficult for me to take any discussion of imposter syndrome seriously that doesn’t consider the possibility the subject feels like an imposter because he is. Having been personally acquainted with several such imposters and having never seen such a discussion I’m left to conclude the entire concept is deeply unserious. Edit: sibling is making much the same point. The concept is only useful if actual imposters can be identified.
chrisseaton 6y ago
Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.
- Myrmornis 6y ago
  No, I don't think that's right. That was my initial impression also, but what's going on is that people are ridiculing the academic advisor who is working at the Council of Economic Advisors at the Whitehouse because his agency (a) released a tweet about Covid with childishly absurd mistakes in it and then (b) he vigorously defended it in a follow-up tweet. The problem they are ridiculing is mainly that an observed time series that is going up and down with no clear trend is "modeled" with a polynomial that necessarily goes down, and that the tweet claims there is some value in the fitted polynomial. Secondarily, the fact that the polynomial is described as cubic, when it appears to be quadratic. Added together it makes it extremely explicitly clear that at the highest levels of American government, even in situations with the involvement of elite academic advisors, the actual technical content is utterly incompetent; childish; totally illiterate from a statistical point of view; bad even at high school.
  - kevinskii 6y ago
    I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
    - kthxbye123 6y ago
      It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.
chadlavi 6y ago
s/academia/every career/g
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  Does the s/ here mean substitute? What is the /g in this context? Is this the regular expression flag for global search? Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.
  - Myrmornis 6y ago
    Yes that's exactly right on both counts.
  - ip26 6y ago
    You're either joshing with us or you have a bright undiscovered future ahead of you in regexp's- given your apparent intuition for them.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      I was kinda hoping I’d read HN for a decade or so then get a job as senior software engineer or systems architect, without all the intervening effort ;)
      - jagannathtech 6y ago
        So I'm not alone with my genius idea.... dang
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Yes. Not easy to google! From the sed manual ('man sed'): s/regular expression/replacement/flags – Substitute the replacement string for the first instance of the regular expression in the pattern space. ... g – Make the substitution for all non-overlapping matches of the regular expression, not just the first one.
- fastball 6y ago
a0w49tjaw4jrt 6y ago
Headline and article content don't line up very well. Actual (short) body of article makes the point that when people in positions of power don't have significant training in statistics, it isn't surprising that they don't understand statistics. But that they do need to understand how much they don't understand. The article says next to nothing about gaming of professional achievement in academia.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- koheripbal 6y ago
  I can offer one small anecdote that maybe reinforces some of the criticisms of academic circles. A long while ago, I worked in IT in the admissions department of a top-5 ivy league school. While there I became good friends with many of the admissions officers for the undergraduate and MBA programs. It's an open secret that admissions are highly influenced by who you know, but what I was stunned by was the overwhelming percentage of each incoming class owes its entry to the connections of their parents. I had always assumed it was some small single digit percentage, but the first time I saw "the list", I was dumbfounded. There is a list of students each year that is sent from the Dean of admissions to admissions department containing the students that must be admitted. The process for rejecting one of those students required the admissions officer to submit a report outlining why - an incredibly rare occurrence. The admissions officers rationalize this as a necessary evil, and cover themselves by pointing to the special attention they pay to diversity candidates. "If I see one more white, indian or asian kid from the upper-east side with a perfect GPA, I'm just going to throw the app out the window" was a quote that stuck in my mind. The list was a collection of applicants who were the children of staff, professors, administrators, and financial or political benefactors. Surprisingly, children of alumni (even those who donated regularly) were not in the group unless they really made an effort over the years and had someone at the school who could call the Dean personally. It sort of bothered me because it made me realize that someone like myself - a good student, non-diversity, with good EC activities was competing for a tiny tiny portion of the admissions slots for any top school. Is it really so much to ask to have a transparent and level playing field in college admissions?
oneiftwo 6y ago
> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons: 1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit. 2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks. 3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit. It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis. Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?
- ahelwer 6y ago
  What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something? Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
  - hpoe 6y ago
    So I agree that people have a fixation on "participation trophies" but the problem it attempts to address, essentially the featherbedding of education is a serious one. In response to your question, about the stupid ribbon, it probably won't but that's the point. Everyone got a freaking ribbon, everyone got a ribbon in third grade, and fourth grade, and so when someone is actually exceptional how do you then distinguish them, you can't. It's not that the ribbon changed anything because you got it, it's because everyone got it that made it worthless. Suddenly everyone can prove to everyone how smart they are, meanwhile those that are actually exceptional in an area without an easily defined winners and loser bracket can never be recognized. This leads quickly to a situation where my ignorance is as good as your facts because we are all can be "right in our own way." The result leads to a distortion of facts a society that can agree on basic reality and everything being run by conmen and manipulators because they realized early on that was the only way to get ahead. Starting to sound familiar?
daemonk 6y ago
Basically: smoothing data != model forecast It's a fair point. But what should have a discussion turned into playground name calling.
- Myrmornis 6y ago
  No, that's what I thought at first, but that's not it. See my post elsewhere in this thread.
viburnum 6y ago
Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.
- cma 6y ago
  You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.
  - HugeAcumen 6y ago
    Not as much as I'd distrust the advice of the squeeziest.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer. Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I think it's meant to be read as, "rich, powerful, and totally undeserving of influence."
- roenxi 6y ago
  The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.
api 6y ago
Doesn't this apply to almost any large bureaucratic organization or system?
- anonymousML123 6y ago
  I've worked on multiple teams at large companies. Tech teams lead by hacker types would make sure to respect and reward technical competence, even if relationships did still matter a whole lot. On the other hand, I've recently worked in "machine learning" teams led by academic snake oil salesmen who publish lots of papers in ML journals and have fancy PhDs. They often regard coding and technical delivery as "grunt work" and do nothing but play corrupt politics, delivering little value. I have a hard time believing the fact that they came from academia has nothing to do with that, although I guess it may be similarly bad under other non-technical leadership and impostors.
  - api 6y ago
    Sounds like academia, government, and most of the business world.
starpilot 6y ago
A moving average would make sense, but cubic fit? WTF? In epidemiology, is there a theoretical basis for death rates to follow any type of polynomial trend with time? If you measure say, drag force vs. airspeed at finite intervals, sure, use a second-order fit. Drag varies with the square of speed, theory predicts that relation. But there isn't such for death rates, is there?
- gowld 6y ago
  The article explains that cubic models are backed by the theory that Excel built-in functions exist for a reason.
scythe 6y ago
I'm just going to comment on the graph, not the tweets. The graph shows three predictions from IHME. One, the blue line, is a model from 3/27. It matches the data okay. The second, the yellow line, is a model from 4/5. The agreement of this line is much worse, and the fact that the model did worse with more data is not promising. The third, the teal line, is a model from 5/4. The data (black) ends at 5/4. So the agreement of the teal line with the black line is not a prediction at all. The red line, a cubic fit, is totally irrelevant. By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. Fitting a simple model like that to a complex time series without some motivation for why that model was chosen is the mathematical equivalent of treating tuberculosis with mercury. My point is: it sure doesn't look like the models are doing a good job of predicting death rates. And that's just from the graph used to advertise them.
- CrazyStat 6y ago
  > By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. It's literally just ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d, optimize a, b, c, and d to minimize some loss function (probably L2).
  - gowld 6y ago
    And since cubics can't be nearly flat over two disjoint intervals separated by an extrenum, they added an unlabelled nonsensical bell curve continuation to the to the end where a cubic would predict the case rate plummeting to negative infinity
    - em500 6y ago
      Not really, they just fitted the cubic to log-deaths and exponentiated them again.
      - CrazyStat 6y ago
        Cubic has to go to +infinity on either the right or left. Exponentiating doesn't help with that.
kbos87 6y ago
So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, respects, and would vouch for me? Everything else aside, that’s what people optimize for when they choose who to promote, respond to reference requests, and generally in who they engage with at work. Oftentimes It seems like it may not even be a conscious behavior, they just know that’s who they have a gut feeling about. I definitely wish this wasn’t the way of the world, as someone who isn’t a natural when it comes to building relationships in a professional setting. But I also don’t let it get me down. It’s an element of human nature that’s hidden many layers deep in the workplace. When I finally faced this fact and started devoting some of the time I previously spent on hard skills, I realized it was far and away the more impactful way to allocate my resources.
- vivekd 6y ago
  Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields like law, academia, politics, and even the corporate world where the results and methods are more abstract and given to opinion. Unfortunately much of the world is run by people who excel in the abstract fields rather than the technical ones.
  - KittenInABox 6y ago
    > I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. Is this actually true? You can bullshit coding...
    - 6y ago
freefriedrice 6y ago
Academia? Shoot... senior hiring in the tech world is the same thing. If you don't have buddies, gooooood luuuuck.
sytelus 6y ago
This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was done by one student? I call it favor economy. You invite X to be your workshop speaker and then you get to be speaker in X's workshop. You add X as co-author in your paper even if X has no real contribution and then expect that X does same for you. This leads to people bragging about having 16 papers in NeurIPS which indicates how deep there are in this favor economy. If you are unwilling to be participant in this favor economy, your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are. The honesty and ethics are perhaps all time low in the history of modern scientific research.
- euix 6y ago
  Putting people on the author list who made no contributions to the paper is known as academic fraud. I am surprised this is allowed.
  - naringas 6y ago
    it's only forbidden if you get caught?
  - sytelus 6y ago
    1 student and 4+ "advisors" aren't uncommon these days. They would show up in meetings, put their attendance and claim their spots. So one can argue its not really "fraud".
  - anonymousML123 6y ago
    It's expected in academia. Even worse, I've seen some main contributors who wrote actual code might not even be included.
- anjc 6y ago
  > your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are There are few metrics with which academia can judge how effective a researcher is. If you're not interested in getting as many papers/citations/awards in whatever way you can then you may be in the wrong game.
aazaa 6y ago
Point 2 in the conclusion states: > Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent, successful, well-connected bluffers. The striking thing is not that a decorated professor and A/Chairman @WhiteHouseCEA made a statistical error, nor should we be surprised that a prominent academic in economics (or any other field) doesn’t understand statistics. What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t. The first sentence sounds like it's going to lead to something about bluffers, but the remainder looks like a re-iteration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A little surprising to not see it mentioned in the article or comments. > In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Myrmornis 6y ago
Most of the top comments in this thread are badly missing the point. This is probably partly due to the title -- the point here is not whether connections and reputation are important. The point is that at the very highest levels of US government, when they have brought in an academic advisors from elite universities, they have ended up presenting absurdly wrong child-like nonsense as their best attempt at analyzing Covid-19 data. Rather few people in this thread have managed to get beyond the title and the slightly opaque columbia.edu blog post to see this. An exception is ahdeanz. It is an extremely depressing and valid point. Yes, human connections will always be important, but we MUST as sensible democracies, ensure that when science needs to be done, it is not left to the those who have been so involved in the world of human politics and dinner-party-approved conversational topics that they can't even vaguely think about something technical. I expect he has many flaws, but Dominic Cummings in the UK Conservative party is on the right side of history here, in wishing for a new era in which politics is not dominated by those with law and humanities degrees. https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/ https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/
nixpulvis 6y ago
Rather than popping off on academia, why not attack the real issue, which is lack of proper testing. No models, forecasts, fittings, or prophecies mean anything with heavily biased data. I'm unaware of a solid method to counteract this problem. If my understanding is correct, we need population-wide testing to get a good basis for predictions of the future. Something which, unless I crawled under a rock again, we simply haven't come close to achieving (at least in my neck of the woods).
anjc 6y ago
>What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t. Does this make sense to anybody? The author is "struck" that somebody is "willing" to talk about something they believe they understand? The only annoying thing about academia is that it seems to attract smug, selfish people like this.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering" [...] >"2. Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent, successful, well-connected bluffers."
SZJX 6y ago
I wonder how many commenters actually read the article posted here. The validity of this general statement is something worth debating, for sure, but in this particular case, it doesn't seem like that Chairman Phillipson "doesn't know what he's talking about", as the author seems to be suggesting. But rather, he's trying to defend his political position, for some political aims (remember that he's a politician now, instead of an academic publishing a paper). It would be quite untenable (though of course not impossible), for a chairman to join force with opinions bashing the results published by his own agency, especially when some clear political antagonism exists. In many situations, it's not that the person doesn't know what they're talking about or is "bluffing", but that they are deliberately presenting a position that fits their current role and benefits them in some way. I totally agree that the former does happen, but those two things are really distinct, and if the author conflates those two and throws out a blanket claim that "stats is hard", it's not really helpful.
naveen99 6y ago
Reputation is just a derivative on people. Just likes options price risk on the stocks and commodities, reputation prices risk of the person. academia is kind of like a rating agency on people’s reputations. Rating agencies can misprice risk like anyone else but only in retrospect.

394 points by luu 6y ago

It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.

kbenson 6y ago
I think there's actually two things going on here. There's what this post is talking about, which is a general lack of understanding of statistics, which is likely true and correct, and likely for both reasons that are explored here. Then there's the reason to actually even talk about this specific instance, which is that there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. Whether it's rampant on twitter and between political parties or has spilled into other areas such that it's harder to have coherent discussions in general now than it was in years past I'm not sure. There are a lot of assumptions in that reply to the tweet in question that's shown. It's not even a novel set of assumptions, it's the standard twitter fare of "I assume he means X and this thing doesn't explicitly show X therefore he must not understand what he's talking about." Any nuance such as using a secondary aspect of something to outline a potion of what you mean is immediately ignored, and if pointed out later assumed to be covering up after the fact.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Well, if you want to express nuance, Twitter might not be the medium for you...
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Lol, I believe that. The problem is that these days it seems like the message either has to be only visible by friendlies, or reduced to the simplest and rote version that's impossible to misinterpret if you want to avoid people trying to tear it apart, and even then they'll sometimes pull it into some wider framework of society and what it means when views through the lens of X, Y and Z and why you should be mad. That's a high bar to hit just to tweet something. It's crazy, and twitter's where it's easiest to see, but you can also use a news aggregator like news.google.com and get a good dose of it just from the headlines about what is ostensibly the same story from different news agencies. Wild times.
- unishark 6y ago
  > ...there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent before making assertions as to other peoples intentions which is rampant currently. This is basically what all politics is. People projecting thoughts (or lack thereof) in bad faith on each other. Though it does seem that the fraction of society sucked into this toxic discourse has grown to cover practically everything lately (in the US anyway). But also the outrage machine of Twitter etc is obviously biased toward the extreme views and outliers. Where 99/100 people might say 'meh, another failure to predict the future like most', the remaining 1/100 blows his top and gets the attention.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    For all the negativity out there, there is a lot more clarity in challenging bad interpretations. I havent learnt as much online recently as I have in 15 yrs on the net.
smnthermes 6y ago
The article may not have technical content, but the title certainly is true: http://pseudoexpertise.com/ http://pseudoexpertise.com/
- thedudeabides5 6y ago
  Well the flame is saying it's a misunderstanding of the difference between data smoothing and model-based forecasting. To which I'd say that just begs the question of if there's a difference to begin with, and what criteria you would use to distinguish them if they are.
  - mcnamaratw 6y ago
    Of course there's a difference between smoothing and forecasting. It's the difference between interpolation and extrapolation. But I can't figure out what anyone in the original discussion is really saying, if anything.
  - dunkelheit 6y ago
    To begin, if the curve doesn't extend into the future, it can't forecast anything.
Animats 6y ago
Um, yes. The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good. This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
- bradford 6y ago
  > The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. I'm curious how you concluded this. Can you (or anyone) recommend a reasoned evaluation of the existing models? We've got a few months of hindsight now and I'm curious hear what any reputable data scientist might have to say. I see criticism of the models online (in op-eds and social media), but the criticisms are usually agenda driven and opaque on technical details, which isn't particularly helpful.
  - Animats 6y ago
    The actuals from now and the predictions from a few weeks ago aren't aligning quantitatively. The shapes of the curves, though, do make sense. Here's the Financial Times graph of actuals, country by country.[1] No predictions. The pattern that shows up in some of the actuals is "huge spike, tight lockdown, big drop". See Italy, Belgium and the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man puts people in jail for weeks for violating quarantine rules. The US didn't have a huge spike, but isn't seeing a big drop, either. US deaths are at about 2/3 of peak. [1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnj&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=1&values=deaths https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=gbr&are...
- cco 6y ago
  > This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno. This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.
dunkelheit 6y ago
> It's not clear what technical content this post has. Indeed. The post is a big exercise in strawmanning (and of course ad hominem but I am willing to forgive it because it adds entertainment value). Andrew Gelman (a well-known statistics expert) dunks on some guy because he dared to defend a shitty graphic and "made a statistical error". Which is kind of unfair, because he didn't do any statistics. Of course when our brains see some curves they can't resist the temptation to do some statistics on their own, but bad dataviz is a different sin than bad statistics and should be treated as such.
starpilot 6y ago
> A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’” https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-model-smoothing https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...
- dnautics 6y ago
  on the other hand, for reals calculus (namely taylor polynomial estimation) also says, "why not a cubic polynomial?"
  - CrazyStat 6y ago
    Because Taylor approximations can lose accuracy very quickly as you move away from the point they are centered around. There are available epidemiological models that are actually grounded in a scientific understanding of the problem. "Why not a cubic polynomial?" is a stupid question.
    - mcnamaratw 6y ago
      "Why not a cubic polynomial?" taken literally is not a stupid question at all. No, it's not a contribution to understanding the problem at the professional level, but it is a fundamental and important question. Somebody persists after hearing the answer (which you gave), that might be stupid.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      Yes, and until you do the correct analysis and estimate just how bad the estimate is going to be (off by 10%? Off by 50%? An order of magnitude?) You can't just dismiss it out of hand. So how far off will it be?
      - CrazyStat 6y ago
        The cubic is going to go to either +infinity or -infinity, so it will eventually be of by infinity%. Or infinity orders of magnitude. I feel like I can dismiss it now.
adfsdfs 6y ago
I think it resembles a cubic spline kernel, FWIW.
- mcnamaratw 6y ago
  Yeah that could be it. But in that case what's the big deal? The data is a messy bump on a log, the fit is a smooth bump on a log. That kind of fit is useless for prediction, but they say so explicitly.

dasudasu 6y ago

This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a way.

threwawasy1228 6y ago
Could you elaborate on this latter point further? I guess maybe I have impostor's syndrome but I have a hard time understanding how you could ever tell if you are that person or not. Imagine the following that I saw on a poker video recently: You have a table full of top-tier poker players and you have a rookie who won a contest to be in a game alongside them. The rookie is playing absolutely terrible, the commentators are cringing at the moves the rookie is making. The other players are clearly doing things to take advantage of the rookies playing style. Yet at the same time, the rookie comes out in 3rd place, up 50k from their buy in at the start of the night. 3 seasoned award winning professionals are all net-negative for the night, some of which are -150k from where they started after 150 hands played. Is this rookie an impostor or not? Does it matter that the rookie is an impostor if he is still beating people who verifiably are not impostors over the average of 150 separate hands? I guess all this is to say that I don't get what value using the impostor's syndrome framing gives us.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  Poker is still a game of chance with beginner's luck being a thing. It's a quote from Buffett, relayed from poker folklore: As they say in poker, “If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”
User23 6y ago
It’s difficult for me to take any discussion of imposter syndrome seriously that doesn’t consider the possibility the subject feels like an imposter because he is. Having been personally acquainted with several such imposters and having never seen such a discussion I’m left to conclude the entire concept is deeply unserious. Edit: sibling is making much the same point. The concept is only useful if actual imposters can be identified.

chrisseaton 6y ago

Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.

Myrmornis 6y ago
No, I don't think that's right. That was my initial impression also, but what's going on is that people are ridiculing the academic advisor who is working at the Council of Economic Advisors at the Whitehouse because his agency (a) released a tweet about Covid with childishly absurd mistakes in it and then (b) he vigorously defended it in a follow-up tweet. The problem they are ridiculing is mainly that an observed time series that is going up and down with no clear trend is "modeled" with a polynomial that necessarily goes down, and that the tweet claims there is some value in the fitted polynomial. Secondarily, the fact that the polynomial is described as cubic, when it appears to be quadratic. Added together it makes it extremely explicitly clear that at the highest levels of American government, even in situations with the involvement of elite academic advisors, the actual technical content is utterly incompetent; childish; totally illiterate from a statistical point of view; bad even at high school.
- kevinskii 6y ago
  I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
  - kthxbye123 6y ago
    It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.

chadlavi 6y ago

s/academia/every career/g

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
Does the s/ here mean substitute? What is the /g in this context? Is this the regular expression flag for global search? Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.
- Myrmornis 6y ago
  Yes that's exactly right on both counts.
- ip26 6y ago
  You're either joshing with us or you have a bright undiscovered future ahead of you in regexp's- given your apparent intuition for them.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    I was kinda hoping I’d read HN for a decade or so then get a job as senior software engineer or systems architect, without all the intervening effort ;)
    - jagannathtech 6y ago
      So I'm not alone with my genius idea.... dang
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Yes. Not easy to google! From the sed manual ('man sed'): s/regular expression/replacement/flags – Substitute the replacement string for the first instance of the regular expression in the pattern space. ... g – Make the substitution for all non-overlapping matches of the regular expression, not just the first one.
fastball 6y ago

a0w49tjaw4jrt 6y ago

Headline and article content don't line up very well. Actual (short) body of article makes the point that when people in positions of power don't have significant training in statistics, it isn't surprising that they don't understand statistics. But that they do need to understand how much they don't understand. The article says next to nothing about gaming of professional achievement in academia.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
koheripbal 6y ago
I can offer one small anecdote that maybe reinforces some of the criticisms of academic circles. A long while ago, I worked in IT in the admissions department of a top-5 ivy league school. While there I became good friends with many of the admissions officers for the undergraduate and MBA programs. It's an open secret that admissions are highly influenced by who you know, but what I was stunned by was the overwhelming percentage of each incoming class owes its entry to the connections of their parents. I had always assumed it was some small single digit percentage, but the first time I saw "the list", I was dumbfounded. There is a list of students each year that is sent from the Dean of admissions to admissions department containing the students that must be admitted. The process for rejecting one of those students required the admissions officer to submit a report outlining why - an incredibly rare occurrence. The admissions officers rationalize this as a necessary evil, and cover themselves by pointing to the special attention they pay to diversity candidates. "If I see one more white, indian or asian kid from the upper-east side with a perfect GPA, I'm just going to throw the app out the window" was a quote that stuck in my mind. The list was a collection of applicants who were the children of staff, professors, administrators, and financial or political benefactors. Surprisingly, children of alumni (even those who donated regularly) were not in the group unless they really made an effort over the years and had someone at the school who could call the Dean personally. It sort of bothered me because it made me realize that someone like myself - a good student, non-diversity, with good EC activities was competing for a tiny tiny portion of the admissions slots for any top school. Is it really so much to ask to have a transparent and level playing field in college admissions?

oneiftwo 6y ago

> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons: 1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit. 2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks. 3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit. It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis. Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?

ahelwer 6y ago
What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something? Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
- hpoe 6y ago
  So I agree that people have a fixation on "participation trophies" but the problem it attempts to address, essentially the featherbedding of education is a serious one. In response to your question, about the stupid ribbon, it probably won't but that's the point. Everyone got a freaking ribbon, everyone got a ribbon in third grade, and fourth grade, and so when someone is actually exceptional how do you then distinguish them, you can't. It's not that the ribbon changed anything because you got it, it's because everyone got it that made it worthless. Suddenly everyone can prove to everyone how smart they are, meanwhile those that are actually exceptional in an area without an easily defined winners and loser bracket can never be recognized. This leads quickly to a situation where my ignorance is as good as your facts because we are all can be "right in our own way." The result leads to a distortion of facts a society that can agree on basic reality and everything being run by conmen and manipulators because they realized early on that was the only way to get ahead. Starting to sound familiar?

daemonk 6y ago

Basically: smoothing data != model forecast It's a fair point. But what should have a discussion turned into playground name calling.

Myrmornis 6y ago
No, that's what I thought at first, but that's not it. See my post elsewhere in this thread.

viburnum 6y ago

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.

cma 6y ago
You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.
- HugeAcumen 6y ago
  Not as much as I'd distrust the advice of the squeeziest.
thephyber 6y ago
> The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer. Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I think it's meant to be read as, "rich, powerful, and totally undeserving of influence."
roenxi 6y ago
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.

api 6y ago

Doesn't this apply to almost any large bureaucratic organization or system?

anonymousML123 6y ago
I've worked on multiple teams at large companies. Tech teams lead by hacker types would make sure to respect and reward technical competence, even if relationships did still matter a whole lot. On the other hand, I've recently worked in "machine learning" teams led by academic snake oil salesmen who publish lots of papers in ML journals and have fancy PhDs. They often regard coding and technical delivery as "grunt work" and do nothing but play corrupt politics, delivering little value. I have a hard time believing the fact that they came from academia has nothing to do with that, although I guess it may be similarly bad under other non-technical leadership and impostors.
- api 6y ago
  Sounds like academia, government, and most of the business world.

starpilot 6y ago

A moving average would make sense, but cubic fit? WTF? In epidemiology, is there a theoretical basis for death rates to follow any type of polynomial trend with time? If you measure say, drag force vs. airspeed at finite intervals, sure, use a second-order fit. Drag varies with the square of speed, theory predicts that relation. But there isn't such for death rates, is there?

gowld 6y ago
The article explains that cubic models are backed by the theory that Excel built-in functions exist for a reason.

scythe 6y ago

I'm just going to comment on the graph, not the tweets. The graph shows three predictions from IHME. One, the blue line, is a model from 3/27. It matches the data okay. The second, the yellow line, is a model from 4/5. The agreement of this line is much worse, and the fact that the model did worse with more data is not promising. The third, the teal line, is a model from 5/4. The data (black) ends at 5/4. So the agreement of the teal line with the black line is not a prediction at all. The red line, a cubic fit, is totally irrelevant. By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. Fitting a simple model like that to a complex time series without some motivation for why that model was chosen is the mathematical equivalent of treating tuberculosis with mercury. My point is: it sure doesn't look like the models are doing a good job of predicting death rates. And that's just from the graph used to advertise them.

CrazyStat 6y ago
> By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. It's literally just ax^3 + bx^2 + cx + d, optimize a, b, c, and d to minimize some loss function (probably L2).
- gowld 6y ago
  And since cubics can't be nearly flat over two disjoint intervals separated by an extrenum, they added an unlabelled nonsensical bell curve continuation to the to the end where a cubic would predict the case rate plummeting to negative infinity
  - em500 6y ago
    Not really, they just fitted the cubic to log-deaths and exponentiated them again.
    - CrazyStat 6y ago
      Cubic has to go to +infinity on either the right or left. Exponentiating doesn't help with that.

kbos87 6y ago

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, respects, and would vouch for me? Everything else aside, that’s what people optimize for when they choose who to promote, respond to reference requests, and generally in who they engage with at work. Oftentimes It seems like it may not even be a conscious behavior, they just know that’s who they have a gut feeling about. I definitely wish this wasn’t the way of the world, as someone who isn’t a natural when it comes to building relationships in a professional setting. But I also don’t let it get me down. It’s an element of human nature that’s hidden many layers deep in the workplace. When I finally faced this fact and started devoting some of the time I previously spent on hard skills, I realized it was far and away the more impactful way to allocate my resources.

vivekd 6y ago
Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields like law, academia, politics, and even the corporate world where the results and methods are more abstract and given to opinion. Unfortunately much of the world is run by people who excel in the abstract fields rather than the technical ones.
- KittenInABox 6y ago
  > I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. Is this actually true? You can bullshit coding...
  - 6y ago

freefriedrice 6y ago

Academia? Shoot... senior hiring in the tech world is the same thing. If you don't have buddies, gooooood luuuuck.

sytelus 6y ago

This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was done by one student? I call it favor economy. You invite X to be your workshop speaker and then you get to be speaker in X's workshop. You add X as co-author in your paper even if X has no real contribution and then expect that X does same for you. This leads to people bragging about having 16 papers in NeurIPS which indicates how deep there are in this favor economy. If you are unwilling to be participant in this favor economy, your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are. The honesty and ethics are perhaps all time low in the history of modern scientific research.

euix 6y ago
Putting people on the author list who made no contributions to the paper is known as academic fraud. I am surprised this is allowed.
- naringas 6y ago
  it's only forbidden if you get caught?
- sytelus 6y ago
  1 student and 4+ "advisors" aren't uncommon these days. They would show up in meetings, put their attendance and claim their spots. So one can argue its not really "fraud".
- anonymousML123 6y ago
  It's expected in academia. Even worse, I've seen some main contributors who wrote actual code might not even be included.
anjc 6y ago
> your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are There are few metrics with which academia can judge how effective a researcher is. If you're not interested in getting as many papers/citations/awards in whatever way you can then you may be in the wrong game.

aazaa 6y ago

Point 2 in the conclusion states: > Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent, successful, well-connected bluffers. The striking thing is not that a decorated professor and A/Chairman @WhiteHouseCEA made a statistical error, nor should we be surprised that a prominent academic in economics (or any other field) doesn’t understand statistics. What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t. The first sentence sounds like it's going to lead to something about bluffers, but the remainder looks like a re-iteration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A little surprising to not see it mentioned in the article or comments. > In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Myrmornis 6y ago

Most of the top comments in this thread are badly missing the point. This is probably partly due to the title -- the point here is not whether connections and reputation are important. The point is that at the very highest levels of US government, when they have brought in an academic advisors from elite universities, they have ended up presenting absurdly wrong child-like nonsense as their best attempt at analyzing Covid-19 data. Rather few people in this thread have managed to get beyond the title and the slightly opaque columbia.edu blog post to see this. An exception is ahdeanz. It is an extremely depressing and valid point. Yes, human connections will always be important, but we MUST as sensible democracies, ensure that when science needs to be done, it is not left to the those who have been so involved in the world of human politics and dinner-party-approved conversational topics that they can't even vaguely think about something technical. I expect he has many flaws, but Dominic Cummings in the UK Conservative party is on the right side of history here, in wishing for a new era in which politics is not dominated by those with law and humanities degrees. https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/ https://dominiccummings.com/the-odyssean-project-2/

nixpulvis 6y ago

Rather than popping off on academia, why not attack the real issue, which is lack of proper testing. No models, forecasts, fittings, or prophecies mean anything with heavily biased data. I'm unaware of a solid method to counteract this problem. If my understanding is correct, we need population-wide testing to get a good basis for predictions of the future. Something which, unless I crawled under a rock again, we simply haven't come close to achieving (at least in my neck of the woods).

anjc 6y ago

>What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t. Does this make sense to anybody? The author is "struck" that somebody is "willing" to talk about something they believe they understand? The only annoying thing about academia is that it seems to attract smug, selfish people like this.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering" [...] >"2. Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent, successful, well-connected bluffers."

SZJX 6y ago

I wonder how many commenters actually read the article posted here. The validity of this general statement is something worth debating, for sure, but in this particular case, it doesn't seem like that Chairman Phillipson "doesn't know what he's talking about", as the author seems to be suggesting. But rather, he's trying to defend his political position, for some political aims (remember that he's a politician now, instead of an academic publishing a paper). It would be quite untenable (though of course not impossible), for a chairman to join force with opinions bashing the results published by his own agency, especially when some clear political antagonism exists. In many situations, it's not that the person doesn't know what they're talking about or is "bluffing", but that they are deliberately presenting a position that fits their current role and benefits them in some way. I totally agree that the former does happen, but those two things are really distinct, and if the author conflates those two and throws out a blanket claim that "stats is hard", it's not really helpful.

naveen99 6y ago

Reputation is just a derivative on people. Just likes options price risk on the stocks and commodities, reputation prices risk of the person. academia is kind of like a rating agency on people’s reputations. Rating agencies can misprice risk like anyone else but only in retrospect.