Professor M

2021-12-27 01:51:18 Is winning the Noble Prize hereditary?

Everybody knows that insanity is hereditary—you get it from your children. I’m curious if winning the Nobel Prize is hereditary, too. Do you also get it from your children?

Josh Angrist (MIT) co-won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics (like we talked about here). Here’s what his son Noam has been up to:
— “Noam Angrist is the Executive Director and co-founder of Young 1ove, one of the largest youth-led NGOs dedicated to scaling-up programs backed by rigorous randomized trial evidence that enable youth to thrive. The organization, headquartered in Botswana, has reached over 100,000 youth across ten countries and has run randomized trials in partnership with J-PAL, solidified multi-year partnerships with UNICEF, USAID and the Brookings Institution, and signed an MOU with the Botswana government to scale-up evidence-based programs nationally.” (Source)

Well. Frankly, it does look like winning the Nobel Prize has a hereditary component. (In the past, we also talked about speaking and eating habits of Nobel Prize winners.)

Not every Nobel Prize winner has a book out there explaining their work in simple terms. Angrist does. If you’re curious, explore “Mastering Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect” (Amazon). Econometrics, after all, is the original data science. Open / Comment

2021-11-13 16:36:53 The house of revenge

I wish I tracked how many times I deliberately walked past this house. As a financial economist, I often think about observable and unobservable characteristics. Using day-to-day observational data to shed light on something unobservable is both an art and a science. Josh Angrist (MIT), Guido Imbens (Stanford), and David Card (Berkeley) got the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for this.

Other people’s thoughts are unobservable; their actions (at least some of them) are observable. I’m wondering what the active choice to daily see the sign “The best revenge is living well” says about a person’s thoughts. And in what other actions do these thoughts manifest themselves?

Well, one other action is observable in the photo. Notice the “No trespassing” sign! Somehow, I’m not surprised that in the neighborhood—super quiet and peaceful—this is the only house with such a warning. Remember Discrete choice and correlated error terms? Error terms do seem correlated over here, don’t they? Open / Comment

2021-10-23 23:56:45 Discrete choice and correlated error terms

To be or not to be? An economist would compare the utility of “to be” and the utility of “not to be” and pick the choice yielding the highest utility. When predicting the choices of others, decompose the utility into an observed component and an unobserved component. The former depends on a choice’s attributes and the sensitivities of a person’s utility to these attributes—both can be quantified. The unobserved component captures the unquantifiable qualities and tastes. Well, if you know nothing about something, you might as well call it the error term that will—keeping the choice attributes and sensitivities to those fixed—push some people to choose “to be” more often and others—“not to be.”

It gets interesting—and realistic—if the error terms persist over time. In other words, the same person would lean in the same direction when faced with a similar choice—even if observable characteristics change a bit.

It gets even more interesting—and more realistic—when we acknowledge that how you do anything is how you do everything. This is just a catchy way of conveying a simple idea—Individual errors terms in a discrete choice model are correlated not only in the time series but also in the cross-section of choices.

Scratch a lie, find a thief? Choosing to lie is consistent with a person’s error term for lying being, say, sufficiently positive—contributing to the person’s decision to lie. If the error terms for lying and stealing are positively correlated, which they likely are, then yes—a liar may be hiding some stolen skeletons in the closet. Open / Comment

2021-10-03 03:14:23 Nature versus Nurture

In 1970, Klara and László Polgár (Wiki) started an unusual experiment “with a simple premise: that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field.” They decided to turn their future children into chess prodigies. And they succeeded. Sofia Polgar is an International Master, while Susan and Judit are Grandmasters—with Judit Polgar (Wiki) being one of the best chess players in the world (No. 8 in July 2004).

The Polgar experiment is a subject of deep discussion in, among other books, “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” (Amazon) by Geoff Colvin.

It appears that László must have been onto something with the conjecture that “Geniuses are made, not born.”
However, the Polgar experiment provides only anecdotal evidence. No scientific conclusion hinges upon just one data point. As such, here’s another data point: The Gracie family (Wiki).

The Gracies set out to turn their future children into fighting prodigies. And they succeeded. The number of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belts in the family is unbelievable. Plus, the Gracies have dominated Vale Tudo and the Ultimate Fighting Challenge (UFC) events.

The Gracie experiment, though, is not as clean as the Polgar story. Hélio Gracie adapted some of the Japanese Jujutsu techniques and effectively created a new martial art, which for decades was called Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Only after within-family squabbles about naming rights did they choose to rename Gracie Jiu-Jitsu into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Hence, one could argue that the Gracies had access to valuable private information that enabled them to mold their children into fighting prodigies. The Polgars were on a level playing field with others because they did not invent chess. However, one could say that the Polgars developed an effective novel method of teaching chess?

Interestingly, many see similarities between chess and jiu-jitsu—both activities involve strategy, tactics, improving one’s position, avoiding blunders, etc. In chess, the goal is to checkmate the opponent’s king on a board. In jiu-jitsu, the goal is to submit the opponent on a mat. The name of one Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy is Checkmat. Clever. I wonder if there’s Stalemat out there? Open / Comment

2021-09-04 15:26:50 Recommendation #2 — Cal Newport

I’ve already mentioned the work of Cal Newport here, here, and here. However, I cannot help but post a separate entry about him in this recommendation thread. Why?

Well. Recommendation #1 was on Matt Levine’s financial newsletter “Money Stuff.” And, in one of his recent posts, Cal Newport referenced a story from “Money Stuff.”

The appeal of building up recommendations in this linked-list nature is too strong for me to resist. I hope someone whose work I follow will talk about Cal Newport. Then, I’ll get to keep playing this game of tag.

In the meantime, consider subscribing to Cal Newport’s blog—it offers a good return on attention. Open / Comment

2021-08-09 00:45:57 Golf course

Self 1 and Self 2 that Timothy Gallwey has been writing about in the Inner Game books go hand in hand with System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Amazon) of Daniel Kahneman. To be precise, Gallwey’s Self 1 corresponds to Kahneman’s System 2; Self 2—to System 1.

In a nutshell—Self 1 is the conscious self, while Self 2 is the subconscious.

According to Gallwey’s coaching experience, one’s athletic performance would improve after learning to turn off Self 1 and let Self 2 do more of the work. And this goes both ways. One can use tennis, or skiing, or golf, or any other practice as an arena for improving one’s ability to get Self 1 out of the way. (Though, of course, the skill of putting Self 2 on pause also seems useful.)

Using a completely different narration style and language, though also in an athletic setting—through golf—Steven Pressfield explores similar concepts in The Legend of Bagger Vance (Amazon). Pressfield’s book, if you forgive the pun, might have as well been called The Bhagavad-Golf. Open / Comment

2021-08-01 02:53:34 When language fails

A picture worth a thousand words is a boring picture. No words can describe a truly worthwhile picture. That’s one of the many ideas explored in the life-changing book “The Inner Game of Tennis” (Amazon).

A verbal explanation can only represent an idea of how to perform a stroke—it is distinct from the precise concept and, more often than not, falls short of elucidating the subtlety and complexity of a stroke.

It’s crucial to form a mental image of a good stroke and be mindful of what the body feels like when you execute it. Learning tennis this way is far more effective than memorizing a step-by-step verbal list of actions and seeking to reproduce it every stroke.

The author, W. Timothy Gallwey, must have stumbled on universal principles, for he also wrote about The Inner Game of Golf, Music, Work, Skiing, and Stress. Open / Comment

2021-07-24 18:49:09 What is a language?

A language is, to some extent, a tool that allows communication between two or more beings. But let’s take it one step further.

What is communication? Communication is the transfer of ideas from one being to another.

Now we have something. When people want to communicate some idea, they encode this idea into words and say them (or type them, like I’m doing right now). On the receiving end, a person decodes the words they hear or read into an idea.

The idea transfusion is, of course, prone to inaccuracies. First, the words heard aren’t necessarily identical to the words said. Second, the encoding of ideas into speech is inevitably imperfect. Third, the decoding of words back into the space of ideas is even more intricate. (Can you truly understand the idea behind the term epiphany if you haven’t experienced one yourself?)

As such, it’s not uncommon for officers in the US military to major in English when in college. Especially when lives are at stake, it’s great to have leaders skilled in encoding complex ideas in simple terms—in terms conducive to accurate decoding.

I’m not sure how easy it is to decode the language of this entry, but hey—I didn’t major in English. Open / Comment

2021-07-17 17:49:22 The Paper Chase (1973) | Prime Video | Wiki

Director: James Bridges

If you want to see the Socratic method in action, watch The Paper Chase (1973), based on a 1971 novel written by John Hay Osborn Jr.

Osborn wrote the novel when he was a third-year student at Harvard Law. As such, he had tasted the Socratic method and other dynamics at highly competitive schools.

But the movie is about so much more than just lecturing-without-lecturing. Even the title itself, The Paper Chase, contains a ton of meaning.

People are great at chasing things. We are fortunate to have sweat glands that regulate our body temperatures and prevent us from succumbing to hyperthermia. Persistence hunters (Wiki) chase prey until it collapses from fatigue and overheating.

Even though chasing comes naturally to us, it matters what you chase and why you chase it. Open / Comment

2021-07-08 07:21:27

Open / Comment