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Readers weren't confused by the overly precise graphs, we were confused by the entire premise of the macroeconomic Monte Carlo article. And they weren't angere

by lotyrin 13y ago

Readers weren't confused by the overly precise graphs, we were confused by the entire premise of the macroeconomic Monte Carlo article. And they weren't angered because of misconstrued intent, but because it was stated that anyone who supports basic income "borders on innumeracy", and the claim was backed up by a toy simulation that addressed roughly none of the potential effects of that policy. The article also attempted to reduce the concept of policy debate into a STEMlord "show me the code or you're wrong" absurdity. Obviously though, the author has learned his lesson. His lines weren't squiggly enough.

unreal37 13y ago
I looked at the example graphs and thought, what the heck was he trying to prove plotting income and job. Thanks for clarifying.
nswanberg 13y ago
I didn't have an opinion on basic income before (though a while ago I came across http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html, which seemed interesting), and I didn't come away from the article and comment thread with an opinion on basic income, but I was very pleased to see a proposal for modeling ideas with computation. It's also very nice to see an adjustment on that proposal with some new information. It wouldn't have occurred to me that making a chart look hand-drawn would be effective in implying less precision, but now I have a new idea I can try out for graphics demonstrating rough ideas. I think Chris's tone can be blunt and read as unaccommodating, which may be distracting from the his points, but I think I prefer it to the overly casual tone many adopt when stating an idea. That tone isn't great for customer service but it's very helpful when trying to understand an idea and whether or not to accept it. Also, it is important to base comments in fact. He accused people on both sides of innumeracy: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy. So I’m going to take the opportunity to launch into a far more interesting mathematical tangent, and illustrate how to use Monte Carlo simulation to understand uncertainty and make business/policy decisions. I promise that this post will be far more interesting to python geeks than to policy wonks. I’m just picking Basic Income as a topic to discuss since it showed up on hacker news yesterday and it’s a topic where I see basically no numbers whatsoever."
anonymoushn 13y ago
Unfortunately he was unwilling to reply to my proposed NOPTransferPayment, which is a system in which each person pays himself or herself a transfer payment. If the payment is large, his preferred model indicates that the cost of the policy is very high, but if the payment is negative, then his preferred model indicates that the policy creates a very great amount of value out of thin air. It is remarkable that someone would stick to such an obviously broken way of modeling the costs and benefits of transfer-payment-like policies (or of policies which have large transfer-payment-like parts, like Basic Job). He even goes out of his way to call attention to his continued insistence on this method months after the fact.
- sheetjs 13y ago
  Some people understand subject matters just enough to make a statement but not well enough to analyze others' statements. Economics in particular seems to be full of these people
  - anonymoushn 13y ago
    His other posts lead me to believe he he is more capable than that.
    - nswanberg 13y ago
      Maybe he didn't see it? No one else responded to the comment either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727029 It's hard to take many interesting ideas out of this implication of bad faith on Chris's part. Wouldn't it be better to talk about the topic of the post?
      - anonymoushn 13y ago
        I hoped that he would see it when it was cross-posted on his blog's comment section, but I also agree that this tangent is not particularly useful.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
wutbrodo 13y ago
> but because it was stated that anyone who supports basic income "borders on innumeracy" This is a blatant misrepresentation of what he said. The exact quote is: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy." First of all, it says nothing about the supporters of a basic income being innumerate, but that the discussion itself (on both sides) is. If you bother to actually _read_ that paragraph, his point is that discussions about basic income don't include an attempt to make things concrete with hard numbers. It's a fair complaint that his analysis is only a baby-step in that direction, but he also explicitly addresses that, saying that he was just giving an example of _how_ one would go about bringing more numbers into the debate (i.e. the missed potential effects that you noticed).
- lotyrin 13y ago
  Ah, I remembered that bit incorrectly. I should have gone back and read the article again in full. His having taken sides on that issue colored how I read and remembered the article. I definitely did not walk away from reading it the first time with the impression that it was a simple illustrative example of how one might bring evidence into policy debate and how simulation can provide evidence when other forms aren't available. I'll try a re-read with that in mind, as I would have quite enjoyed that conclusion. Perhaps opponents to BI were able to get to that bit undeterred. It might be that unassuming squiggly imprecise graphs might be only the beginning of the required revisions if that was to be the core takeaway.
  - wutbrodo 13y ago
    I'm pretty strongly in support of a basic income (or at least the exploration of the idea), but it's possible that the version I read was after some updates to the article that made his intent more clear (e.g. the PS and PPS appear to have been added after the initial publication).
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    It's not even about bringing evidence to the debate. I had planned on doing that in a followup blog post about Markov Chain Monte Carlo, but I haven't gotten around to finishing that one yet. This post was simply about clearly and quantitatively expressing your beliefs.
blahedo 13y ago
I didn't see that article the first time around, but I have to agree with the parent post; when I read today's post, I saw the graphs and didn't understand what they were trying to say (with or without xkcd-ification). So I quickly skimmed the December article for context on those graphs, and I still didn't understand what they were actually representing. Rereading that section, and the code, I slowly decipher it... they are presenting histograms... I see labels "cost_benefit", so presumably that's a ratio... oh wait in the next paragraph he writes "cost - benefits" so I guess it's a scalar... but I still don't see why the side-by-side histograms are presented with varying-width buckets... oh, because he fixed the Y-axis, which constrains the bucket widths.... The problem, as lotyrin implies, isn't that the "lines weren't squiggly enough". It's that it's a graph that's hard to read and understand what it's trying to say, due to a total lack of labels or context. (I also take issue with a lot of his assumptions and even his definition of Basic Income, but if we take in good faith his claim that his Monte Carlo article wasn't about economics and public policy but about python and using the scipy library, those are not necessarily complaints about the article.)
- gone35 13y ago
  This. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but plots without axis labels are a big no-no and far from 'publication quality'. In academic publishing the general editorial goal is to aim to make your graphs as readable as possible on their own, without forcing the reader to refer to the article to try make sense of them. Just my two cents.

by lotyrin 13y ago

unreal37 13y ago

I looked at the example graphs and thought, what the heck was he trying to prove plotting income and job. Thanks for clarifying.

nswanberg 13y ago

I didn't have an opinion on basic income before (though a while ago I came across http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html, which seemed interesting), and I didn't come away from the article and comment thread with an opinion on basic income, but I was very pleased to see a proposal for modeling ideas with computation. It's also very nice to see an adjustment on that proposal with some new information. It wouldn't have occurred to me that making a chart look hand-drawn would be effective in implying less precision, but now I have a new idea I can try out for graphics demonstrating rough ideas. I think Chris's tone can be blunt and read as unaccommodating, which may be distracting from the his points, but I think I prefer it to the overly casual tone many adopt when stating an idea. That tone isn't great for customer service but it's very helpful when trying to understand an idea and whether or not to accept it. Also, it is important to base comments in fact. He accused people on both sides of innumeracy: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy. So I’m going to take the opportunity to launch into a far more interesting mathematical tangent, and illustrate how to use Monte Carlo simulation to understand uncertainty and make business/policy decisions. I promise that this post will be far more interesting to python geeks than to policy wonks. I’m just picking Basic Income as a topic to discuss since it showed up on hacker news yesterday and it’s a topic where I see basically no numbers whatsoever."

anonymoushn 13y ago

Unfortunately he was unwilling to reply to my proposed NOPTransferPayment, which is a system in which each person pays himself or herself a transfer payment. If the payment is large, his preferred model indicates that the cost of the policy is very high, but if the payment is negative, then his preferred model indicates that the policy creates a very great amount of value out of thin air. It is remarkable that someone would stick to such an obviously broken way of modeling the costs and benefits of transfer-payment-like policies (or of policies which have large transfer-payment-like parts, like Basic Job). He even goes out of his way to call attention to his continued insistence on this method months after the fact.

sheetjs 13y ago
Some people understand subject matters just enough to make a statement but not well enough to analyze others' statements. Economics in particular seems to be full of these people
- anonymoushn 13y ago
  His other posts lead me to believe he he is more capable than that.
  - nswanberg 13y ago
    Maybe he didn't see it? No one else responded to the comment either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6727029 It's hard to take many interesting ideas out of this implication of bad faith on Chris's part. Wouldn't it be better to talk about the topic of the post?
    - anonymoushn 13y ago
      I hoped that he would see it when it was cross-posted on his blog's comment section, but I also agree that this tangent is not particularly useful.
yummyfajitas 13y ago

wutbrodo 13y ago

> but because it was stated that anyone who supports basic income "borders on innumeracy" This is a blatant misrepresentation of what he said. The exact quote is: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy." First of all, it says nothing about the supporters of a basic income being innumerate, but that the discussion itself (on both sides) is. If you bother to actually _read_ that paragraph, his point is that discussions about basic income don't include an attempt to make things concrete with hard numbers. It's a fair complaint that his analysis is only a baby-step in that direction, but he also explicitly addresses that, saying that he was just giving an example of _how_ one would go about bringing more numbers into the debate (i.e. the missed potential effects that you noticed).

lotyrin 13y ago
Ah, I remembered that bit incorrectly. I should have gone back and read the article again in full. His having taken sides on that issue colored how I read and remembered the article. I definitely did not walk away from reading it the first time with the impression that it was a simple illustrative example of how one might bring evidence into policy debate and how simulation can provide evidence when other forms aren't available. I'll try a re-read with that in mind, as I would have quite enjoyed that conclusion. Perhaps opponents to BI were able to get to that bit undeterred. It might be that unassuming squiggly imprecise graphs might be only the beginning of the required revisions if that was to be the core takeaway.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  I'm pretty strongly in support of a basic income (or at least the exploration of the idea), but it's possible that the version I read was after some updates to the article that made his intent more clear (e.g. the PS and PPS appear to have been added after the initial publication).
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  It's not even about bringing evidence to the debate. I had planned on doing that in a followup blog post about Markov Chain Monte Carlo, but I haven't gotten around to finishing that one yet. This post was simply about clearly and quantitatively expressing your beliefs.

blahedo 13y ago

I didn't see that article the first time around, but I have to agree with the parent post; when I read today's post, I saw the graphs and didn't understand what they were trying to say (with or without xkcd-ification). So I quickly skimmed the December article for context on those graphs, and I still didn't understand what they were actually representing. Rereading that section, and the code, I slowly decipher it... they are presenting histograms... I see labels "cost_benefit", so presumably that's a ratio... oh wait in the next paragraph he writes "cost - benefits" so I guess it's a scalar... but I still don't see why the side-by-side histograms are presented with varying-width buckets... oh, because he fixed the Y-axis, which constrains the bucket widths.... The problem, as lotyrin implies, isn't that the "lines weren't squiggly enough". It's that it's a graph that's hard to read and understand what it's trying to say, due to a total lack of labels or context. (I also take issue with a lot of his assumptions and even his definition of Basic Income, but if we take in good faith his claim that his Monte Carlo article wasn't about economics and public policy but about python and using the scipy library, those are not necessarily complaints about the article.)

gone35 13y ago
This. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but plots without axis labels are a big no-no and far from 'publication quality'. In academic publishing the general editorial goal is to aim to make your graphs as readable as possible on their own, without forcing the reader to refer to the article to try make sense of them. Just my two cents.