Information Processing

Transparency in college admissions

2012-02-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

Daniel Golden (Bloomberg) reports that the Department of Education is now investigating both Princeton and Harvard regarding discrimination against Asian-American applicants.

I was asked by Bloomberg to write an op-ed on this topic, which should appear later today. Here's an early peek.

Transparency in College Admissions

Today we learned from Bloomberg that the U.S. Education Department is investigating complaints that Harvard University and Princeton University discriminate against Asian-Americans in undergraduate admissions. It is a common belief among Asian-American families that their children are held to higher academic standards than applicants from other ethnic groups, including whites. Such practices were openly acknowledged as a result of internal investigations at universities like Berkeley and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s. Have they now been corrected?

Statistics seem to support a claim of widespread discrimination across most of elite higher education. For example, in comprehensive statistics compiled as part of Duke University’s Campus Life and Learning project (as reported in a recent analysis by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono and collaborators), Asian-American students averaged 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks. There is every reason to believe that a similar pattern holds at almost every elite university in America, with some notable exceptions such as Caltech. In fact, Duke may be one of the mildest offenders when it comes to Asian-American admissions: with the goal of increasing its overall student quality, Duke has reportedly been more friendly recently to Asian-American applicants than traditional powers such as Harvard and Princeton.

Schools like Harvard and Princeton brag that each year they reject numerous applicants (such as Jian Li, who filed a complaint against Princeton) who score a perfect 2400 on the SAT. How would we feel if it were revealed that almost all of these rejected top scorers, year after year, were Asian-Americans? I challenge Harvard and Princeton to refute this possibility.

To be fair, most elite universities practice what is known as holistic admissions: each candidate is evaluated on a variety of measures, including athletic and leadership activities in addition to academic performance. It is possible that the gap between Asian-American and white admits in academic average is compensated by gaps in the opposite direction on these other variables. Looking again at internal evaluations by Duke’s admissions office, we find Asian-Americans had higher averages than whites in the following categories: Achievement, Curriculum (each about ⅓ of a standard deviation) and Letters of Recommendation, while trailing very slightly (less than one tenth of a standard deviation) in Personal Qualities. Lacking data on factors such as legacy and recruited athlete status, we still cannot make a complete determination of the “fairness” of the process, and in fact the appropriate weightings of the various factors appearing in holistic admissions will be the subject of vigorous debate.

Nevertheless, this exercise in admissions forensics indicates how participants in the admissions process can be reassured about its even handedness. Certainly the Department of Education will seek data of this sort in making its determination concerning Harvard and Princeton. In my opinion, any educational institution, public or private, which receives significant government support, should be required to release aggregate admissions data of this kind, which includes information about ethnicity, legacy and athletic status, and all other variables of significant weight in the admissions decision. Transparency is essential to this important discussion, and the requirement could easily be mandated by the Department of Education.

Why are admissions practices at a small number of universities, that account for only tiny fraction of all US undergraduates, of such importance? For the simple reason that these universities are disproportionately responsible for producing future leaders, innovators, scientists and scholars -- they are the stewards of some of the best human capital from around the world. Further, top US universities are seen as exemplars of excellence by educational institutions both here and abroad. It is terribly corrosive to use race as an important factor in what are superficially (disingenuously?) described as meritocratic evaluations. Perhaps the most objectionable outcome is to produce a distribution of students on campus whose intellectual strength is strongly correlated to their race. Surely this is exactly the opposite of what Martin Luther King wanted when he asked us to judge not by the color of skin, but by the content of character.

Some recommended reading

2012-01-31T13:25:00.000-08:00

Robert Wald reviews the 2010 book Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality, based on meetings at Oxford and at the Perimeter Institute, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Everett's paper.

A central issue in the Everett interpretation is the status of the `Born rule', which asserts that, for state ψ, the probability of obtaining a particular outcome of a measurement is ||Pψ||2, where P is the projection operator onto the eigensubspace associated with the measurement outcome. In traditional interpretations, the Born rule is simply postulated as part of the collapse hypothesis. In the Everett interpretation, it is far from obvious that the Born rule even has any meaning—if all outcomes occur, how can one talk about the probability of a particular outcome? Given the importance of this issue, it is highly appropriate that four chapters of the book (by Saunders, Papineau, Wallace, and Greaves and Myrvold) are devoted to addressing probability and the Born rule from the Everett viewpoint, and three chapters (by Kent, Albert, and Price) are devoted to criticising these views.

... In any case, if the conclusion of a mathematically correct argument is that rational decision strategies require the Born rule, then there must be quite a bit lying in the assumptions. The articles by Kent, Albert, and Price do a good job of fleshing out these assumptions and pointing out the weaknesses and flaws in the probability and decision theory discussions within the Everett framework. ...

See here for my thoughts on this.

The origin of the Everettian heresy (see also Byrne's excellent biography of Everett).

... These efforts gave rise to a lively debate with the Copenhagen group, the existence and content of which have been only recently disclosed by the discovery of unpublished documents. The analysis of such documents opens a window on the conceptual background of Everett’s proposal, and illuminates at the same time some crucial aspects of the Copenhagen view of the measurement problem. Also, it provides an original insight into the interplay between philosophical and social factors which underlay the postwar controversies on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

... Here is a tentative chronology of the thesis versions and of the related papers:

(1a) Objective vs Subjective probability, short manuscript (ﬁrst half of 1955).
(1b) Quantitative Measure of Correlation, short manuscript (summer 1955).
(1c) Probability in Wave Mechanics, short manuscript (summer 1955).

(2) Wave Mechanics Without Probability, second version of the dissertation (the long thesis) (winter 1955–1956), published as The Theory of the Universal Wave Function (1973).

(3) On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ﬁnal dissertation (winter 1956–1957), published as ‘‘Relative State’’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (July 1957).

A Commentary on ‘Common SNPs Explain a Large Proportion of the Heritability for Human Height’ by Yang et al. (2010). (Ungated pdf.) Why do Visscher and company have to speak so slowly and enunciate so carefully in order to be understood?

During the refereeing process (the paper was rejected by two other journals before publication in Nature Genetics) and following the publication of Yang et al. (2010) it became clear to us that the methodology we applied, the interpretation of the results and the consequences of the findings on the genetic architecture of human height and that for other traits such as complex disease are not well understood or appreciated ...

Well before reading the Yang et al. paper, but after hearing much about "missing" heritability, I asked impatiently why GWAS researchers had not tried to make a global fit of total heritability, as opposed to searching for individual alleles. See also Heritability 2.0.

Turkheimer on heritability: Still Missing.

A century of familial studies of twins, siblings, parents and children, adoptees, and whole pedigrees has established beyond a shadow of a doubt that genes play a crucial role in the explanation of all human differences, from the medical to the normal, the biological to the behavioral ...

As a social scientist and twin researcher, I had to struggle with the biological and statistical genetics underlying the Yang et al. analyses, but the analysis of variance, the acausal “capturing” and “tracking” of one domain of variance with another came naturally to me. The situation was reversed for the geneticists who were the target audience of the paper: biologically based scientists, accustomed to genes that have an actual causal pathway to their outcomes. Over and above its technical brilliance, the real contribution of the Yang et al. article is to bring into focus this conceptual chasm between biological and quantitative genetics, and thus between the physical sciences and social science. Genomics is only now learning a hard lesson that social scientists had to learn a long time ago: sometimes prediction is just prediction. That is what the missing heritability problem is really about, and why it has not yet been solved

For more Turkheimer, see here. Note that although he emphasizes the difficulty of teasing out causality in a complex system, for some "engineering" applications (such as genetic engineering), prediction may be enough, as long as the correlations between genetic variant and phenotype are confirmed to be robust across a variety of environments. The specific causal mechanism is not as important as the ability to modify and control ;-)

Looking back

2012-01-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

Megan McCardle on her 10 year reunion at Chicago's Booth School of Business.

The Atlantic: ... For my summer 2000 internship at Merrill Lynch, I chose the technology-banking group despite having watched the March 2000 NASDAQ crash from the lobby of Merrill’s auditorium, where we were supposed to be undergoing orientation. Ignoring the helpless, angry flapping of the HR staff, a bunch of us spent the afternoon telling nervous jokes and watching the eerie flicker that billions of dollars give off when they evaporate on live TV.

Predictably, the technology-banking group had almost no work. Also, I was not a good fit with Merrill’s very conservative, very competitive culture. I felt as if I’d decided to intern with a mathematically gifted baboon tribe, and I’m sure they were just as puzzled by me. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t get a full-time offer. Having learned my lesson, I very sensibly turned around and took a full-time job upon graduation at … a technology-strategy consultancy. I got laid off even before the bankers.

And they were laid off in droves, along with the consultants and aspiring dot-com employees; during my first year or two in New York, my recollection is that at least half my classmates there lost their jobs. Ten years later, only a few of the people I spoke with were still where they’d started out.

How could we have failed to notice the danger? You know how: It’s the same reason your cousin bought that 16-room McMansion on an option ARM. Everyone else had been doing it for years, with seemingly stellar results. Why wouldn’t we follow in such successful footsteps?

... Indeed, if Booth is any indication, the complaint that “the best and the brightest” are being siphoned off into consulting and finance is less true today. ... Morton told me that current classes don’t talk as much as mine did about money; they talk about the things they want to make and do.

Of course, these days, there’s also less money to distract them. Financiers are still rich—in 2010, the industry accounted for 5.3 percent of New York’s private-sector jobs, but 23.5 percent of its private-sector wages. But despite all the news about their huge bonuses, they aren’t as rich or as numerous as they used to be. By the end of 2012, New York’s Office of the State Comptroller expects the post-crisis job losses on Wall Street to top 30,000. Finance-related activities used to account for about 20 percent of state tax revenues; they now account for about 13 percent.

Other data back this up. At some point in the weekend—probably after that second round of shots—someone said, “We are the 1 percent!” I pointed out that this is not literally true, since the entry point (as of 2009) for the top 1 percent is $343,927 a year. (In Washington, but not in Chicago, this is what passes for amusing cocktail chatter.)

However, those of us who left finance can take heart, because we are a lot closer to the top 1 percent than we used to be. In 2007, the entry point was $410,096. The top 1 percent’s share of national income has also dropped recently, as the finance professor Steven Kaplan pointed out when I ran into him. In fact, for all the fanfare greeting recent studies by the Congressional Budget Office on rising income inequality from 1979 to 2007, according to Kaplan’s calculations, between 2007 and 2009 the share of adjusted gross income that went to the top 1 percent dropped from 23.5 percent to 17.6 percent—the largest two-year drop since 1928–30.

A few years back, Kaplan and the economist Joshua Rauh compared the incomes of Wall Street executives, “Main Street” executives, and celebrities such as professional athletes. They found that much of the rise in income inequality between 1994 and 2004 was due to the jump in Wall Street incomes: those of investment bankers, venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and top securities lawyers—the incomes that so many in my class were chasing.

... WITH EVEN QUITE conservative economists agreeing that the financial sector got too large and too risky, that’s not a bad thing—not even for my classmates. A banker who parachuted into equity research years ago said frankly, “I wish I made more money.” On the other hand, he pointed out, waxing on about the shorter hours and lower stress, “the lifestyle is much, much better.”

My classmates and I might not all have 1 percent–level incomes, but almost everyone seemed to have what Occupy Wall Street says it wants: stable, interesting, well-paying jobs … and a clear future. The few people who are still in finance are the ones who really like it, and are presumably really good at it. And the rest of us are probably better off than if we’d bartered away every waking moment of our 30s.

The most remarkable thing about my business-school reunion was, in fact, how little people talked about money or jobs. They talked about family, friends, the trips they took, and the houses they were turning into homes. According to the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, they were talking about what is really important: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” Now, that’s a universe worth mastering.

Dismantling Detroit

2012-01-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior

2012-01-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

I found this econtalk podcast very interesting. The comments are also good.

We Americans are very lucky to have inherited a high trust society from our forebears. How much longer will it last?

Econtalk: David Rose of the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the book and the role morality plays in prosperity. Rose argues that morality plays a crucial role in prosperity and economic development. Knowing that the people you trade with have a principled aversion to exploiting opportunities for cheating in dealing with others allows economic actors to trust one another. That in turn allows for the widespread specialization and interaction through markets with strangers that creates prosperity. In this conversation, Rose explores the nature of the principles that work best to engender trust. The conversation closes with a discussion of the current trend in morality in America and the implications for trust and prosperity.

See also this Wired article: The Neurobiology of Integrity.

In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” Berns said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.” ...

Whether sacred principles offer utilitarian benefits over long periods of time — many years, perhaps many generations, and at population-wide as well as individual scales — is beyond the current study design, but Berns suspects that one of their benefits is simplicity.

“My hypothesis about the Ten Commandments is that they exist because they’re too hard to think about on a cost-benefit basis,” he said. “It’s far easier to have a rule saying, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ It simplifies decisionmaking.”

US manufacturing jobs

2012-01-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Good manufacturing jobs that remain in the US will require significant skills, such as the ability to run capital intensive equipment. Unfortunately, most of the population lacks the requisite abilities. This Atlantic article does a good job of contrasting the future prospects of two young workers at a plant that makes fuel injectors. What percentage of the US manufacturing workforce is capable of doing Luke's job, even after (free) retraining?

Making It in America

In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products ... sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.

... Maddie got her job at Standard through both luck and hard work. She was temping for a local agency and was sent to Standard for a three-day job washing walls in early 2011. “People came up to me and said, ‘You have to hire that girl—she is working so hard,’” Tony Scalzitti, the plant manager, told me. Maddie was hired back and assigned to the fuel-injector clean room, where she continued to impress people by working hard, learning quickly, and displaying a good attitude. But, as we’ll see, this may be about as far as hustle and personality can take her. In fact, they may not be enough even to keep her where she is.

... Luke Hutchins is one of Standard’s newest skilled machinists. ... He transferred to Spartanburg Community College hoping to study radiography, like his mother, but that class was full. A friend of a friend told him that you could make more than $30 an hour if you knew how to run factory machines, so he enrolled in the Machine Tool Technology program.

At Spartanburg, he studied math—a lot of math. “I’m very good at math,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you. I got formulas written down in my head.” He studied algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. “If you know calculus, you definitely can be a machine operator or programmer.” He was quite good at the programming language commonly used in manufacturing machines all over the country, and had a facility for three-dimensional visualization—seeing, in your mind, what’s happening inside the machine—a skill, probably innate, that is required for any great operator.

... When Luke got hired at Standard, he had two years of technical schoolwork and five years of on-the-job experience, and it took one more month of training before he could be trusted alone with the Gildemeisters. All of which is to say that running an advanced, computer-controlled machine is extremely hard.

... Luke says that on a typical shift, he has to adjust the machine about 20 times to keep it on spec. A lot can happen to throw the tolerances off. The most common issue is that the cutting tool gradually wears down. As a result, Luke needs to tell the computer to move the tool a few microns closer, or make some other adjustment. If the operator programs the wrong number, the tool can cut right into the machine itself and destroy equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Luke wants to better understand the properties of cutting tools, he told me, so he can be even more effective. “I’m not one of the geniuses on that. I know a little bit. A lot of people go to school just to learn the properties of tooling.” He also wants to learn more about metallurgy, and he’s especially eager to study industrial electronics. He says he will keep learning for his entire career.

In many ways, Luke personifies the dramatic shift in the U.S. industrial labor market. Before the rise of computer-run machines, factories needed people at every step of production, from the most routine to the most complex. The Gildemeister, for example, automatically performs a series of operations that previously would have required several machines—each with its own operator. It’s relatively easy to train a newcomer to run a simple, single-step machine. Newcomers with no training could start out working the simplest and then gradually learn others. Eventually, with that on-the-job training, some workers could become higher-paid supervisors, overseeing the entire operation. This kind of knowledge could be acquired only on the job; few people went to school to learn how to work in a factory.

... For Maddie to achieve her dreams—to own her own home, to take her family on vacation to the coast, to have enough saved up so her children can go to college—she’d need to become one of the advanced Level 2s. ...

It feels cruel to point out all the Level-2 concepts Maddie doesn’t know, although Maddie is quite open about these shortcomings. She doesn’t know the computer-programming language that runs the machines she operates; in fact, she was surprised to learn they are run by a specialized computer language. She doesn’t know trigonometry or calculus, and she’s never studied the properties of cutting tools or metals. She doesn’t know how to maintain a tolerance of 0.25 microns, or what tolerance means in this context, or what a micron is.

Tony explains that Maddie has a job for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie’s job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it’s simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense.

“What worries people in factories is electronics, robots,” she tells me. “If you don’t know jack about computers and electronics, then you don’t have anything in this life anymore. One day, they’re not going to need people; the machines will take over. People like me, we’re not going to be around forever.”...

See also this old post Outsourcing vs technological innovation.

Another related article from the NYTimes, this time about Apple and Foxconn. Excellent video.

NYTimes: ... Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Gracie Breakdown: heel hook edition

2012-01-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

Gracie Breakdown of UFC 142, leading off with the Rousimar Palhares heel hook finish.

Back in the day when grappling and BJJ were still fringe activities, I often had to travel to strange clubs to find training. It was intimidating to visit a new school where I didn't know anyone, even more so to spar with people who could easily injure me. The one submission I was most afraid of was the heel hook. The two serious injuries I sustained in years of training were from a straight armbar (juji gatame) and a heel hook, which sprained the tendons around my knee. The heel hook is much more effective on the street, where the opponent is likely to be wearing shoes and pants (escaping by pulling the leg out is much harder than in MMA), although there are also reasons not to pull guard in a street fight.

Here's a Palhares highlight video. Beautiful jiujitsu and very dangerous leglocks.

How did East Asians become "yellow"?

2012-01-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

I previously recommended the podcast New Books in History, hosted by University of Iowa historian Marshall Poe. I noticed recently that the format has been adopted by professor podcasters in other fields, including Sociology, Philosophy, Policy Studies, Military History, etc. For example, here are the podcasts from New Books in East Asian Studies.

I found the interview with Michael Keevak on his recent book (below) quite interesting. It is amusing that Native Americans are "red", whereas E. Asians are "yellow". Keevak notes that European travelers to Asia before the 18th century never used this characterization. The earliest reference Keevak can find where the terminology is used is in a classification of races of man by Carl Linnaeus.

See earlier post Yellow Peril: 2010 and 1920.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase "yellow peril" at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University.

Lana Del Rey

2012-01-15T07:56:00.000-08:00

From internet sensation to SNL last night.

Call me crazy, but Video Games is a great song and could become part of the indie pop canon -- check out all the covers on YouTube that have appeared just in the last few months. One critic writes: ... the music video "flits between surrendering to romance and depression, moving with the elegant wastefulness of the kind of day drunk that's a true privilege of the beautiful, idle class."

Inside Duke: hurting the ones we love?

2012-01-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

This very interesting study had access to comprehensive data ranging from Duke admissions office evaluations of applicants, to students' intended majors and subsequent shifts, to grades awarded and student composition (including abilities!) for each course offered at Duke. Interesting factoid: 40% of fathers of White students at Duke have doctorates.

For similar studies (although not emphasizing ethnicity) using U Oregon data, see Data mining the University , Psychometric thresholds for physics and mathematics.

What Happens After Enrollment? An Analysis of the Time Path of Racial Differences in GPA and Major Choice

Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban M. Aucejo, Ken Spenner

May 24, 2011

Abstract
If affirmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start off behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. However, this convergence masks two effects. First, the variance of grades given falls across time. Hence, shrinkage in the level of the gap may not imply shrinkage in the class rank gap. Second, grading standards differ across courses in different majors. We show that controlling for these two features virtually eliminates any convergence of black/white grades. In fact, black/white gpa convergence is symptomatic of dramatic shifts by blacks from initial interest in the natural sciences, engineering, and economics to majors in the humanities and social sciences. We show that natural science, engineering, and economics courses are more difficult, associated with higher study times, and have harsher grading standards; all of which translate into students with weaker academic backgrounds being less likely to choose these majors. Indeed, we show that accounting for academic background can fully account for differences in switching behaviors across blacks and whites.

For a review of Richard Sander's analysis of affirmative action in law school admissions, see here.

The results of all of these studies can be summarized as: to first approximation, psychometric predictors work, and in an unbiased way across ethnicities.

James Crow colloquium

2012-01-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

Watch The Progress of Genetics From the 1930s to Today - Ep. 514 on PBS. See more from University Place.

Excellent colloquium by James Crow (who passed away recently) emphasizing the importance and ubiquity of additive genetic variance. See earlier post -- the paper linked there covers similar material.

@28 min, Nagylaki came to population genetics after doing his PhD under Feynman at Caltech! Here is his tour de force result, mentioned by Crow in the talk. Interested physicists, see also here.

"Phantom" heritability

2012-01-09T12:12:00.000-08:00

The mystery of missing heritability: Genetic interactions create phantom heritability

Or Zuk, Eliana Hechter, Shamil R. Sunyaev, and Eric S. Lander

Human genetics has been haunted by the mystery of “missing heritability” of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained by a set of variants is the ratio of (i) the heritability due to these variants (numerator), estimated directly from their observed effects, to (ii) the total heritability (denominator), inferred indirectly from population data. The prevailing view has been that the explanation for missing heritability lies in the numerator—that is, in as-yet undiscovered variants. While many variants surely remain to be found, we show here that a substantial portion of missing heritability could arise from overestimation of the denominator, creating “phantom heritability.” Specifically, (i) estimates of total heritability implicitly assume the trait involves no genetic interactions (epistasis) among loci; (ii) this assumption is not justified, because models with interactions are also consistent with observable data; and (iii) under such models, the total heritability may be much smaller and thus the proportion of heritability explained much larger. For example, 80% of the currently missing heritability for Crohn's disease could be due to genetic interactions, if the disease involves interaction among three pathways. In short, missing heritability need not directly correspond to missing variants, because current estimates of total heritability may be significantly inflated by genetic interactions. Finally, we describe a method for estimating heritability from isolated populations that is not inflated by genetic interactions.

This new paper by Eric Lander and collaborators is attracting a fair amount of interest: gnxp , genetic inference , genomes unzipped. The paper is discussed at some length at the links above. I will just make a few comments.

1. The non-additive models analyzed in the paper require significant shared environment correlations to mask non-additivity and be consistent with data that (at face value) support additivity. See Table 7 in the Supplement. This level of environmental effect is, in the cases of height and g, probably excluded by adoption studies, although it may still be allowed for many disease traits. To put this another way, even after reading this paper I do not know of any models consistent with what is known about height and g that do not have a large additive component (e.g., of order 50 percent of total variance).

2. The criticisms in section 11 of Hill, Goddard, and Visscher (2008; also discussed previously here) are, to my mind, rather weak. To quote a string theorist friend: "It is nothing more than the calculus of words" ;-) In particular, I flat out disagree with the following (p.46 of the Supplement):

The problem with this reasoning is: As the population grows (and the typical locus tends toward monomorphism), typical traits involving typical loci become very boring! They not only have low interaction variance VAA, they also have very low total genetic variance VG. That is, the typical trait doesn't vary much in the population! In effect, Hill et al.'s theory thus actually describes what happens for rare traits caused by a few rare variants. Not surprisingly, interactions account for a small proportion of the variance for such traits.

[[ Nope, one could also take the rarity to zero and the number of causal variants to infinity keeping the population variance held fixed! This seems to be what happens in the real world with quantitative traits like height and g having thousands of causal variants, each of small effect. ]]

"Doesn't vary very much" is not well-defined: relative to what? What if the genetic variance in this limit is still much larger than the environmental component? Do height and IQ "vary very much" in human populations? Having only moderately rare variants (e.g., MAF = .1-.2), but many of them, is consistent with normally distributed population variation and small non-additive effects (.2 squared is 4 percent). Below is figure 9 from the Supplement -- click for larger version. As the frequency p approaches zero (or unity) the additive variance (green curve) dominates and the non-additive part becomes small (blue curve). Whether the total genetic variance (red curve) is big or small might be defined relative to the size of environmental effects, which are not shown. Note the green and blue curves are dimensionless ratios of variances, whereas the red curve ultimately (after multiplication by effect size) has real units like cm of height or IQ points.

The essence of Hill et al. is discussed in the earlier post (see comments).

Yes, one of the main points of the paper I cited is that one can have strong epistasis at the level of individual genes, but if variants are rare, the effect in a population will be linear.

"These two examples, the single locus and A x A model, illustrate what turns out to be the fundamental point in considering the impact of the gene frequency distribution. When an allele (say C) is rare, so most individuals have genotype Cc or cc, the allelic substitution or average effect of C vs. c accounts for essentially all the differences found in genotypic values; or in other words the linear regression of genotypic value on number of C genes accounts for the genotypic differences (see [3], p 117)." [p.5]

Note Added: For more on additivity vs epistasis, I suggest this talk by James Crow. Among other things he makes an evolutionary argument for why we should expect to find lots of additive variation at the population or individual level, despite the presence of lots of epistasis at the gene level. It is much more difficult for evolution to act on non-additive variance than on additive variance in a sexually reproducing species.

Eric Lander profile

2012-01-05T19:34:00.000-08:00

The NYTimes ran a nice profile of Broad Institute director Eric Lander a few days ago.

Interestingly, the article emphasizes several factors aside from his formidable intellect that are responsible for his success as a scientist: curiosity, openness, extraversion, ambition, drive ...

NYTimes: ... He was so good that he was chosen for the American team in the 1974 Mathematics Olympiad. To prepare, the team spent a summer training at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

This was the first time the United States had entered the competition, and the coaches were afraid the team would be decimated by entrants from Communist countries. (Indeed, the Soviet Union placed first, but the Americans came in second, just ahead of Hungary, which was known for its mathematics talent.)

Dr. Zeitz was Dr. Lander’s roommate that summer. The two recall being the only team members who did not come from affluent suburban families, and the only ones who did not have fathers. But Eric stood out for other reasons.

“He was outgoing,” Dr. Zeitz recalled. “He was, compared to the rest of us, definitely more ambitious. He was enthusiastic about everything. And he had a real charisma.” Team members decided that Dr. Lander was the only one among them whom they could imagine becoming a United States senator one day.

At first, though, it looked as if the young mathematician would follow a traditional academic path. He went to Princeton, majoring in mathematics but also indulging a passion for writing. He took a course in narrative nonfiction with the author John McPhee and wrote for the campus newspaper.

He graduated as valedictorian at age 20, won a Rhodes scholarship, went to Oxford and earned a mathematics Ph.D. there in record time — two years. Yet he was unsettled by the idea of spending the rest of his life as a mathematician.

“I began to appreciate that the career of mathematics is rather monastic,” Dr. Lander said. “Even though mathematics was beautiful and I loved it, I wasn’t a very good monk.” He craved a more social environment, more interactions.

“I found an old professor of mine and said, ‘What can I do that makes some use of my talents?’ ” He ended up at Harvard Business School, teaching managerial economics.

He had never studied the subject, he confesses, but taught himself as he went along. “I learned it faster than the students did,” Dr. Lander said.

Yet at 23, he was growing restless, craving something more challenging. Managerial economics, he recalled, “wasn’t deep enough.”

He spoke to his brother, Arthur, a neurobiologist, who sent him mathematical models of how the cerebellum worked. The models “seemed hokey,” Dr. Lander said, “but the brain was interesting.”

His appetite for biology whetted, he began hanging around a fruit-fly genetics lab at Harvard. A few years later, he talked the business school into giving him a leave of absence.

He told Harvard he would go to M.I.T., probably to learn about artificial intelligence. Instead, he ended up spending his time in Robert Horvitz’s worm genetics lab. And that led to the spark that changed his life. ...

Mathematical minds

2012-01-03T15:46:00.000-08:00

A colleague recommended this beautifully written Quora answer concerning the nature of mathematical thinking. I recommend reading it in its entirety.

The particularly "abstract" or "technical" parts of many other subjects seem quite accessible because they boil down to maths you already know. You generally feel confident about your ability to learn most quantitative ideas and techniques. A theoretical physicist friend likes to say, only partly in jest, that there should be books titled "______ for Mathematicians", where _____ is something generally believed to be difficult (quantum chemistry, general relativity, securities pricing, formal epistemology). Those books would be short and pithy, because many key concepts in those subjects are ones that mathematicians are well equipped to understand. Often, those parts can be explained more briefly and elegantly than they usually are if the explanation can assume a knowledge of maths and a facility with abstraction.

Learning the domain-specific elements of a different field can still be hard -- for instance, physical intuition and economic intuition seem to rely on tricks of the brain that are not learned through mathematical training alone. But the quantitative and logical techniques you sharpen as a mathematician allow you to take many shortcuts that make learning other fields easier, as long as you are willing to be humble and modify those mathematical habits that are not useful in the new field.

You move easily between multiple seemingly very different ways of representing a problem. For example, most problems and concepts have more algebraic representations (closer in spirit to an algorithm) and more geometric ones (closer in spirit to a picture). You go back and forth between them naturally, using whichever one is more helpful at the moment. ...

Spoiled by the power of your best tools, you tend to shy away from messy calculations or long, case-by-case arguments unless they are absolutely unavoidable. Mathematicians develop a powerful attachment to elegance and depth, which are in tension with, if not directly opposed to, mechanical calculation. Mathematicians will often spend days thinking of a clean argument that completely avoids numbers and strings of elementary deductions in favor of seeing why what they want to show follows easily from some very deep and general pattern that is already well-understood. Indeed, you tend to choose problems motivated by how likely it is that there will be some "clean" insight in them, as opposed to a detailed but ultimately unenlightening proof by exhaustively enumerating a bunch of possibilities. In A Mathematician's Apology [http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss..., the most poetic book I know on what it is "like" to be a mathematician], G.H. Hardy wrote:

"In both [these example] theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions. There are no complications of detail—one line of attack is enough in each case; and this is true too of the proofs of many much more difficult theorems, the full appreciation of which demands quite a high degree of technical proficiency. We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way." ...

You are good at generating your own questions and your own clues in thinking about some new kind of abstraction. One of the things I've reliably heard from people who know parts of mathematics well but never went on to be professional mathematicians (i.e., write articles about new mathematics for a living) is that they were good at proving difficult propositions that were stated in a textbook exercise, but would be lost if presented with a mathematical structure and asked to find and prove some "interesting" facts about it. ...

Concretely, this amounts to being good at making definitions and formulating precise conjectures using the newly defined concepts that other mathematicians find interesting. One of the things one learns fairly late in a typical mathematics education (often only at the stage of starting to do research) is how to make good, useful definitions. ...

Genomic prediction

2012-01-01T07:58:00.001-08:00

This recent paper gives a sense of the current state of the art in quantitative genetics. Height is one of the easiest phenotypes to measure, so almost every medical (disease) GWAS provides some additional data -- IIRC, about 200k pheno/geno-type pairs are available for analysis. With a few hundred associated variants detected (depending on how one defines the discovery threshold), one can start to construct predictors like the Weighted Allele Score (WAS) shown below (which is essentially the breeding value from population genetics). See related posts here, here and here.

It is interesting to think about what a similar figure would look like once loci accounting for 50% or 80% of total variance have been identified. (The current value is about 10%.) I would guess this will happen within 5-10 years (approx. 10^7 individuals of known height genotyped).

Common Variants Show Predicted Polygenic Effects on Height in the Tails of the Distribution, Except in Extremely Short Individuals

PLoS Genet 7(12): e1002439. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002439

Abstract: Common genetic variants have been shown to explain a fraction of the inherited variation for many common diseases and quantitative traits, including height, a classic polygenic trait. The extent to which common variation determines the phenotype of highly heritable traits such as height is uncertain, as is the extent to which common variation is relevant to individuals with more extreme phenotypes. To address these questions, we studied 1,214 individuals from the top and bottom extremes of the height distribution (tallest and shortest ,1.5%), drawn from ,78,000 individuals from the HUNT and FINRISK cohorts. We found that common variants still influence height at the extremes of the distribution: common variants (49/141) were nominally associated with height in the expected direction more often than is expected by chance (p,5610228), and the odds ratios in the extreme samples were consistent with the effects estimated previously in population-based data. To examine more closely whether the common variants have the expected effects, we calculated a weighted allele score (WAS), which is a weighted prediction of height for each individual based on the previously estimated effect sizes of the common variants in the overall population. The average WAS is consistent with expectation in the tall individuals, but was not as extreme as expected in the shortest individuals (p,0.006), indicating that some of the short stature is explained by factors other than common genetic variation. The discrepancy was more pronounced (p,1026) in the most extreme individuals (height,0.25 percentile). The results at the extreme short tails are consistent with a large number of models incorporating either rare genetic non-additive or rare non-genetic factors that decrease height. We conclude that common genetic variants are associated with height at the extremes as well as across the population, but that additional factors become more prominent at the shorter extreme.

Finding the Next Einstein

2011-12-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

Duke researcher Jonathan Wai interviewed me for his Psychology Today blog, Finding the Next Einstein. Below are my answers to two of his questions.

Psychology Today

Is it true Feynman's IQ score was only 125?

Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test. I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton. It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided-his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities. I recall looking at excerpts from a notebook Feynman kept as an undergraduate. While the notes covered very advanced topics-including general relativity and the Dirac equation-they also contained a number of misspellings and grammatical errors. I doubt Feynman cared very much about such things.

Do you think we will ever find another Einstein?

This is a very difficult question. Einstein was special for many reasons, and was the dominant figure in 20th century physics, if not all of science.

In the modern era many more people have access to advanced education-think of India and China plus all of the developed world. While I believe even an average scientist these days is quite an exceptional person, both in terms of ability and the amount of training he or she has received, it is much more difficult now to stand out in the crowd. Think of the NBA: the average player today is much better than the average player of 50 years ago. Any guard in the league is an athletic freak of nature. But when they play against each other they are relatively evenly matched. It may be a long time before we encounter another giant like Einstein who so far surpasses his contemporaries.

If you are interested in psychometrics and the far tail of cognitive ability, I recommend several of Jonathan's papers, including:

Wai, J., Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. P. (2005). Creativity and occupational accomplishments among intellectually precocious youths: An age 13 to age 33 longitudinal study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 484-492. pdf

Merry Christmas, 2011

2011-12-25T08:09:00.000-08:00

Linus said it best (Luke 2.14) in A Charlie Brown Christmas:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Merry Christmas!

We had wonderful weather yesterday in Eugene. After arriving home from the airport I was able to take the kids to the park, wearing shorts in the warm sunshine. Best wishes to everyone!

Tropical xmas in southern China

2011-12-22T22:53:00.000-08:00

We went for a walk today after lunch and I took these photos of the Sheraton Dameisha.

Asian admissions, statistical prediction, and all that

2011-12-22T16:55:00.000-08:00

This post addresses comments by Sineruse, David Versace, and others on earlier threads here, here and here.

I've been pretty busy during my visit to BGI so I kind of lost track of the conversation. But here are my thoughts.

I think it is possible that Asian "strength of application" overpredicts later career success*. There could be many reasons for this. For example, it could be that Asian hard work boosts test taking results and grades more than it does real world achievement. It could also be that tests and grades are fair, whereas Asians face a certain amount of race-related disadvantage later in their careers -- e.g., unconscious bias, lack of "ethnic affinity" networks, etc. (If you talk to highly trained Chinese scientists and businesspeople returning to China from the US, most will describe an uphill struggle for Asians in the US; this contrasts with glib statements by white Americans about how little anti-Asian bias there is in elite careers). Finally, Asians may have lower rates of sociopathy, which reduces their chances of making it to the top (close inspection suggests it is mostly sociopaths at the top ;-)

I don't think the evidence is overwhelming on this question. But if, say, Asians have a .5 SD advantage in g and 1 SD advantage in conscientiousness or work ethic, that might lead to a "fair" Ivy population representation which is less than 20% if by "fair" we mean: apportion slots based on future success odds. (An additional factor which is usually mistakenly ignored in numbers like +.5/+1 is the large offshore "reservoir" of Asians and the fact that some A-As are drawn from a very elite subgroup in their ancestral countries.) Note though, as emphasized by RKU, the current Ivy standards for what constitutes "success" may not be aligned with the real interests of the Nation. That is, the connection between money and power and actual value creation in our current system seems to have become quite weak of late. What is good for Harvard may not necessarily be what is good for the USA.

Having said all this, I think you are missing a key point -- perhaps because you think mainly in terms of (white) ethnic interests. Even if elite universities are acting in their narrow self-interest in assessing an outright Asian penalty to compensate for inflation of application strength, their methodology may violate the law. While some Asian application profiles overestimate later career prospects, universities should not be allowed to make generalizations based solely on race. This may not be a principle that you believe in, but it's an important one to me. If universities have some other way to correct for false signals in admissions profiles ("this kid scored high, but we know he's just a grind"), then fine. However, I suspect what is going on now is crudely (if perhaps subconsciously) race-based**.

* Something to keep in mind is that Harvard et al. would like to have influence abroad as well as at home, and Chinese ethnicity alumni are well placed to influence what will soon be the largest economy on the planet. Underperformance vs predictor in the US may be compensated by overperformance in the new reality of the coming century. Ask yourself why BGI was more willing to work with me than, say, the Sanger or Broad institutes might have been.

** An astute commenter asks why we should oppose race-based decision making, if there is real correlational information to be had from ethnicity. I offer two reasons: 1. this country has a bad record on race, and striving towards a race-blind society is worth some small sacrifices, 2. the evidence for genetic group differences is not conclusive and should be treated with great caution.

BGI photos: December 2011

2011-12-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

BGI coffee room. I charged the espresso on Chris Chang's badge.

Film crew takes in a technical discussion. Rare mutations, pseudogenes and rs numbers.

Shooting at a hipster pad in Dameisha. Barbeque and a showing of Gattaca :-)

Season's Greetings from BGI

2011-12-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Southern China. We're at about the same latitude as Hawaii, so the weather is quite temperate even in December.

Dutch documentarians shooting in the BGI cafeteria.

Sheraton Dameisha.

National Review: Applying While Asian

2011-12-16T07:17:00.000-08:00

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. Almost every journalist who has talked to me about this issue asks "Gee, how long has this been going on?" and are surprised when I tell them at least 30 years!

But who cares, those Asians don't make trouble: they'll just work harder ...

Applying While Asian

To check or not to check the Asian box? That is the pointed choice faced by Asian-American students applying for admission to what are supposed to be the most tolerant places on earth, the nation’s colleges.

The Associated Press ran a report on Asian students of mixed parentage checking “white,” if possible, on their applications to avoid outing themselves as Asian. The Princeton Review Student Advantage Guide counsels Asian-American students not to check the race box and warns against sending a photo.

... All of this is done to promote a “diversity” of a crude, bean-counting sort. The private California Institute of Technology doesn’t use quotas; its student body is 39 percent Asian. The University of California at Berkeley is forbidden by law from using quotas; its student body is more than 40 percent Asian. Only a bigot would believe that these schools are consequently worse learning environments, or that they are places characterized by monochromatic, lockstep thinking because so many students share a broad-brush ethnic designation.

The author of The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden, calls Asian-Americans “the new Jews,” a reference to the 20th-century quotas that once kept Jews out of top schools. The difference then was that Jews collectively didn’t stand for the policy, now a watchword for disgraceful bias. Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon and an outspoken critic of current admission practices, laments that Asians seem strangely accepting of the unfair treatment of their children. The official Asian-American groups tend to support anti-Asian quotas because they are captives of liberal orthodoxy before all else. ...

An NRO commenter writes

I'm whitebread umpteenth generation American. My husband is Chinese by way of Malaysia. We met at the same elite college. The discrimination against Asian students is an open secret--everyone Asian knew, or at least suspected, that it was the case. It's part of why my husband and I have decided to hyphenate my WASP last name with his (thankfully) not terribly ethnic sounding Chinese surname. We don't want our children, 20 years from now, to be hurt when applying for college, should saner winds have not prevailed.

Malaysia actually presents an instructive example. In Malaysia, about 25% of the population is Chinese, and government quotas which require a certain number of ethnic Malays win university places and jobs mean that Chinese students much earn much higher scores than Malay students to win university slots. The result of this is that academic expectation for Chinese students get ever higher, while those Chinese Malaysians who can afford it try to send their kids abroad. It's not an accident that my husband wound up at an American university--it's the result of my in-laws driving him for years to get him there.

And therein lies the rub. My husband comes from a country where racial quotas are explicit, published, and protesting them will cause the government to retaliate. (Malaysia's government recently essentially outlawed freedom of assembly.) Elections are rigged, and everyone knows this. The government has forged an ethnic, institutional and religious alliance to repress the Chinese population. My husband is still surprised that Americans are willing to openly speak out against and protest against the government.

Many Asian immigrants are only recently removed from governments that do not invite the opinions of their citizens. It takes time to learn, really learn, that it is acceptable to demand accountability of institutions and of governments, and I don't see that happening overnight.

But it is happening, slowly. Every Chinese American I've talked to of college age knows about these quotas, and I don't think these first generation Americans will stand for their children being treated in the same manner.

Human capital, globalization and physics 101

2011-12-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

In the past few years we have seen a large influx of undergraduate students from China. Since UO non-resident tuition is about $15k per annum, these students must come from relatively affluent families there. The conventional wisdom among professors familiar with China is that most of these kids are slackers -- they didn't do well enough on the gaokao to be admitted to a top Chinese university. How good are "slackers" from China? Judge for yourself.

Below is the score distribution from the course I taught this fall, physics 101 for non-majors (about 200 students total). The black histogram is non-Chinese, the red is Chinese, most of whom, judging by their names, are from PRC. Why was this analysis necessary? Because I noticed the score distribution was very different from previous times I had taught the course. About 20-30 PRC kids scored higher than what is usually the highest score. (Click for larger version.)

Here are two exam problems.

An ant slowly pushes a box of mass .1 kg and coefficient of friction .1 a distance of 10m, moving at constant speed. Calculate the work done.

A satellite orbits the Earth at a distance of 3 Earth radii from the center. Compute its gravitational acceleration.

Future vol

2011-12-15T08:16:00.000-08:00

Hmm... pricing in a 30-50% chance of huge vol due to euro credit crisis? If you're sure it's going to happen, some 6-12 month vol swaps might be a good trade. Any experts want to comment? (Are there better instruments for this?) How much further can Merkozy kick the can down the road?

On the volatility of volatility

A pro sez to me: "Vol is totally mispriced right now. Lots of funding requirements in the new year."

Borges: A poet never rests

2011-12-13T21:04:00.000-08:00

"The revelation can occur at any time. A poet never rests.

He's always working, even when he dreams.

Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one.

You think you are alone, and as the years go by,

if the stars are on your side, you may discover

that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends

whom you will never get to know, but who love you.

And that is an immense reward."

The Deal: The debate over elite schools and elite jobs

2011-12-13T07:40:00.001-08:00

More on elitism and credentialism in an article by Editor in Chief Robert Teitelman at The Deal. Related posts.

The cognitive-phonetic dissonance of Asian names for English speakers is on display: I am referred to as "Hsui" and "Hsiu", but never "Hsu" (Hopefully fixed before you read this :-)

The Deal: There is a fascinating discussion unfolding across the Internet that reaches into all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies. Its origin is a paper from Lauren Rivera, "Ivies, Extracurricular and Exclusion: Elite Employers' Use of Educational Credentials." Rivera, a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, spent several years interviewing "elite" professional service firms, meaning investment banking, consulting and law firms. Her conclusions, which have been batted around the blogosphere, come down to a handful of talking points: These elite employers primarily recruit from roughly four "super-elite" universities (these differ slightly depending on the area or the individual, and include both undergraduate and graduate recruiting, though it's amazing to see the schools that are considered "second-tier") and care more for the school than for the academic record; busy evaluators have a lot of leeway in deciding who to interview and who not; and (as in college admission) extracurricular activities have become a key secondary filter, but only if they're out of the norm -- playing college lacrosse, say, as opposed to intramural football.

Reading Rivera's paper is a revelation -- and shocking. "Evaluators," she writes, "relied so intensely on the criteria of 'school' as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of the elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms -- in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was 'too abstract,' 'overly theoretical,' or even, 'useless' compared to the more 'practical' and 'relevant' training offered at 'lesser' institutions -- but rather due to the strong cultural meanings and character judgments evaluators attributed to admission and enrollment at an elite school." Rivera quotes a recruitment manager at an investment bank who talks about schools that aren't in the super-elite category: "I'm just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole. And I'm pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It's tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to get someone to raise their hand and say, 'Let's bring this candidate in.' ... Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at ... the Brown candidates, you know the Yale candidates. I don't have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the 'best of the rest' folder unless I've run out of everything else. ... Unfortunately it's just not a great situation. There's not an easy way to get into the firm if you're not at a target school."

... Manzi questioned the exclusivity of Rivera's super-elite and argued from personal experience that consultants at least do demand not just high course and test scores, but a certain rigor in course selection, particularly in math and science. Hsiu, a physicist at the University of Oregon, then offered a further distinction between hard and soft firms, which are looking for subtly different skills. His distinction turns almost entirely on quantitative abilities. Hard firms, like hedge and venture firms and tech startups, demand sheer mathematical brainpower and will take it where they can find it. Soft firms such as investment banks, law and consulting firms that sell services, like advice, that is more "nebulous" and harder to measure, and where "prestige" matters more, embrace the elite-school brand more readily. Hsiu can't help but give more value to those measurable standards, although a number of his commenters argued with him on that point.

Hmm... no problems with these other names:

... Bloggers Bryan Caplan, Megan McArdle, Fabio Rojas, Steve Hsui and Jim Manzi have offered up perspectives on an issue that speaks to everything from the crisis in higher education to increasing inequality to the size and influence of finance. Perhaps because of the subject matter, the comments on many of these posts are well worth reading as well.

Gracie Breakdown: UFC 140

2011-12-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

Gracie breakdown of the Mir-Nog fight. Glad to see even two blackbelts named Gracie had a little trouble reconstructing exactly what happened. You have to give props to Frank Mir -- 260 lbs with technical and explosive jits. I always wondered how Sakuraba got so good with his acrobatic kimura attacks -- to train that would seem to put your partners at a lot of risk!

Equilibration in progress: legal services

2011-12-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

Earlier discussion here, here and here.

WSJ: ... wages are rising in developing countries such as India ... but remain relatively soft here in the U.S. and the U.K.

... The price gap has narrowed between offshore legal processing groups—which charge between $25-$35 an hour for basic legal services such as document review—and domestic services offered by contract review attorneys in places such as the Midwest, which might charge $25 to $30 per hour. ...

The glut of new law school graduates in 2012 will likely put offshore legal services outfits at a further disadvantage, the report found.

Those not familiar with the current realities for new law school grads, see here.

Snap Crackle Pop: UFC 140

2011-12-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

WAR Frank Mir!

No time to tap. I love his explosive style of BJJ. In training you're taught to let the other guy tap, but a real fight is different. See here for some technical post-fight comments from Frank. (More MMA and BJJ theory at 2:45 here.)

The fundamental asymmetry of MMA

"F@ck jiujitsu -- I'm gonna break your nose."

"Maybe, but if I get my hands on you there's no tapping. I'm tearing your arm off."

In MMA, it's unfair that the striker gets to hit the other guy at full power, but the grappler has to release the hold when the other guy taps. If there was no referee the striker would think very, very hard before mixing it up. [Some guy tries to break my nose or fracture my skull, and I'm supposed to let him tap?!?]

When I was faculty advisor for the Yale jiujitsu club we considered t-shirts with "Snap, Crackle, Pop" on them, but went with something more conservative like "Yale Brazilian Jiujitsu" :-)

Video of Mir's submission. Nogueira is a top grappler and the last 50 seconds shows some very technical BJJ. Mir escapes a guillotine, gets the kimura, and prevents Nog from escaping a couple of times. Reminds me of what Sakuraba did to Renzo, or Kimura to Helio! On closer review, Nog did have plenty of time to tap, but refused to do so -- just like Helio. Another video.

Differential validity of the SAT

2011-12-09T16:42:00.000-08:00

In an earlier comment thread someone asked whether Asian-American college performance is commensurate with their SAT scores. If A-A SAT scores are artificially elevated by cramming then one might expect it to under-predict college GPA. (On the other hand, if Asians are more conscientious and hard working overall, one might* expect that to elevate both SAT scores and college GPA relative to other groups.) This data from the College Board shows that the validity of SAT as a predictor of college GPA is about the same for whites and Asians.

*Regarding cramming, I have yet to see any data which shows that large groups of people can significantly elevate their SAT scores through preparation. Test prep companies will claim this is possible, but detailed studies by ETS suggest otherwise. In our U Oregon data set (covering all students at the university over a 5 year period) it is quite rare to see a change of 1 population SD between max and average score for individual students who take the SAT multiple times.

(Click for larger version. FYGPA = Freshman Year GPA.)

Jim Manzi: How elite business recruiting really works

2011-12-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

Jim Manzi writes about recruiting at elite consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG. The earlier post of mine he refers to is here (click through for more links, including to an even earlier post with excerpts from the Rivera paper).

National Review: There has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about a research paper by Lauren Rivera that describes how elite professional service firms (top investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms) go about hiring. ...

... I’ll focus my comments on management consulting, where I used to work for about ten years. I participated in every stage of the process from job candidate to new junior consultant to hiring partner.

Start with some quick industry background. You can divide management consulting into “strategy consulting” and “other.” Strategy consulting is the elite end of the consulting business. Most of strategy consulting can be sub-divided into two tribes: McKinsey and “Bruce Henderson’s children.” McKinsey is the industry leader. Bruce Henderson founded the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the 1960s. A number of BCG spin-offs have occurred since (e.g., Bain, SPA, LEK, etc.), and some of these have created further spin-offs. By far the largest and most important is Bain. Together, McKinsey, Bain and BCG (“MBB”) are the dominant elite recruiters for consulting, though a swarm of smaller strategy firms can compete successfully for the best talent.

... Rivera grossly exaggerates the degree to which access is limited to graduates of 4 super-elite schools.

... Rivera grossly overestimates the importance of extracurriculars, and grossly underemphasizes the importance of standardized test scores, and especially, case interviews.

... In my experience as a resume screener, the logic normally goes something like this.

If you don’t have at least 750 on the math SAT, you’re out. The most common score is 800. Math plus verbal scores should be well over 1500, and typically over 1550. GRE, GMAT and other scores should be scaled similarly. [ Note, this would lead to a huge overrepresentation from top schools even if institutional prestige were not directly a factor of consideration. With a filter like that there are a limited number of schools where on-campus interviews would be cost effective. But I think "typically over 1550" may be an exaggeration. ]

Then, your degree should be in something hard: math, physics, electrical engineering, analytical philosophy, computer science and so on. It’s OK to major in history or literature, but you better have some really tough quantitative or analytical classes on your transcript, and have done very well in them. [ I'm not sure if I believe this last part -- I think plenty of humanities and social science types get hired in consulting without any technical background -- especially from HYPS. ]

... In an earlier post, Steve Hsu made a useful distinction between what he calls the “soft” elite firms that Rivera profiles (investment banks, law firms and management consultancies) versus “hard” elite firms such as hedge/venture funds, startups and technology companies. He argues that the hard elite firms produce something more measurable, and therefore rely less on prestige in selecting people. This distinction is a useful starting point, but what has been happening over the past 20 years or so is the increasing migration of value from soft to hard; basically, to math, technology and analytics-intensive work. This is happening within firms and industries – the emphasis on math ability was growing within consulting in the period I worked in it, as it was within banking – and across sectors as technology start-ups and math-intensive finance became the most obvious ways to make real money in America. This isn’t random, but is happening because these are huge opportunities to create value. This is in part why I left consulting to start an analytics software company. It became obvious that this was the way to create value for clients. This won’t last forever, but has been true for some time. [ Italics mine. ]

Borges' The Witness

2011-12-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

I am ecstatic at now having thousands of books, both technical and non-technical, available in searchable formats on my laptop, tablet and iphone.

I came across this brief Borges piece, originally published in 1960, by accident while surfing through my digital book collection. A quick trip to my shelves showed that I had this in physical form, but somehow had never read it.

See also the perils of precocity.

The Witness

In a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the animals, humbly tries to will himself into death, much as a man might will himself to sleep. The day, obedient to vast and secret laws, slowly shifts about and mingles the shadows in the lowly place; outside lie plowed fields, a ditch clogged with dead leaves, and the faint track of a wolf in the black clay where the line of woods begins. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten.

The bells for orisons awaken him. Bells are now one of evening's customs in the kingdoms of England, but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sacred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again. The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder—and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?

I, quant

2011-12-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

A commenter linked to this Guardian interview with a UK quant. I found a number of his comments interesting enough to post here. See the original for more detail about the software he develops. I always felt that if I went into finance it would be as a trader, but with quant skills ;-)

"My parents discovered that I was of a mathematical bent aged three when I was apparently lining up my toys in order of size and then colour. I was one of these terrible, precocious kids who did their mathematics O-level aged 12. After a long academic career I ended up doing theoretical physics for my PhD, and spent a couple of years at Cern in Geneva. Many people I know from back then are still at universities, doing research and climbing the slippery slope to professorships and fellowships. They work the same astonishing long hours as I do, yet get paid a fraction and, from a purely scientific perspective, get to do some really, really interesting science. I often say (only half jokingly) that I "sold my soul" – I make a little over £200,000 a year, including my bonus."

"I said I was a quant, derived from the word 'quantitative'. We're the people of a definite mathematical bent, and if you're looking for a warrior-like analogy, we are perhaps the "armourers" of the financial industry, or, let me think … Traders are the warriors of our world; they go out and fight. I think of them as 'egos on legs'. Sharp suits, looking very smart… We quants are the trader's brain. It's our model that defines not only the risks the trader can take, the model also calculates how much risk he is taking with his particular trades at any given moment and we also predict future movements in valuation, pricing and the like."

"I have been in banking for over 20 years, and for several years I was with one of the major international investment banks. I discovered that I am just not enough of an arsehole to make it there. Why the top people at investment banks are like that? Well you have a thousand vice-presidents vying for 10 managing director posts. What do you think will happen? People will do anything to get ahead, back-biting, back-stabbing, the whole nine yards. For those of us who find life surrounded by other people difficult enough as it is, the requirement to network is hellish."

"Not sure though that I'd voluntarily swap IQ points for EQ – even though I'm certain that I'm going to end up as one of the single old blokes that you might occasionally come across – nice, big house in the country, lots of dogs, materially comfortable and yet utterly alone and mad as a fish.

Later, when asked to elaborate on that final point, he responds via email:

"I've long been aware of the prospect (with some 'tongue-in-cheek') of becoming mad as a fish, and the attractiveness of the current imbalance between EQ and IQ is that I know that my biggest, deepest fear is failure. With the current imbalance, I know that the risk of failure is reduced to its current level: eg, small but still real. That fear of failure drives me and means that I know I'm giving up anything approaching EQ in pursuit of avoidance of failure."

From Walden Pond to quant trading

2011-12-02T13:20:00.001-08:00

True story. Theoretical physicist saves enough money during 5 years of postdoc to retire -- living entirely from investment income at $7k per year of expenditures (budget).

I simply saved more than three quarters of my income for five years. The math works out. If you save 83% and spend 17%, you need 25*0.17/0.83 ~ 5 years of savings, where 25 is the inverse of 4%, which is a safe withdrawal rate for at least 30 years.

While enjoying frugal living and retirement in his mid-30's, this former physicist starts a widely followed blog and authors a book: Early Retirement Extreme (ERE).

How does this story end? With the hero living a quiet Walden-esque life of contemplation and home cooked meals? No, of course after a few years he un-retires to join a fund as a quant trader/researcher!

What I like to do is solving impossible problems. Or just “hard problems”—problems that people don’t want to wrestle with. I did this in physics and learned a lot. I realized that I wouldn’t learn very much from solving a similar problem in physics and that’s why I quit physics. The challenge would not have been the same. Fortunately, I realized this quickly and I had the money to quit or “retire from my career“.

ERE is another one such “hard” problem solved (it’s only hard, because it’s somewhat out-of-the-box and thus more a question of shifting your perspective than it being any kind of technical challenge). I’ve written enough material here on the blog and in the book to show you how it’s done. I have the same problem with ERE. The challenge is gone for me. Many others are currently on the road towards financial independence and this is exciting for them but for me it’s just vicarious living. Becoming financially independent, the subject of this blog, is a period of transition and obviously one can only transition once. This is why fresh blood is needed.

[Uhh, part of the challenge is maintaining the minimalist lifestyle, well, for the rest of your life...]

... So what am I going to do now? Well, yesterday I got a job offer as a quant trader/researcher. I took it! I think this fulfills all my criteria. It’s a hard problem, it requires no marketing, no politics, no self-promotion, and no management. As far as I can tell, I’m safe from the Peter principle and can focus on research and development without worrying about suddenly finding myself having to sell or manage my stuff.

When I told this story to my wife she thought perhaps the job offer came from a rich former colleague in physics, who did it just to test him (i.e., f#ck with him) and throw a monkey wrench into the ERE equilibrium! ("Ha ha, Buddha came down from the mountain for chump change!") I won't be surprised if in 10 years this guy is complaining that his second home in the Hamptons is too small ;-)

"I'm not Asian"...

2011-12-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

Increasing numbers of Asian-American college applicants understand the odds are stacked against them, and react by not declaring their ethnicity or (in the case of mixed race applicants) checking any box but Asian.

See previous related posts: here , here

I'm Not Asian (AP): Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half Taiwanese and half Norwegian. But when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

"I didn't want to put 'Asian' down," Olmstead says, "because my mom told me there's discrimination against Asians in the application process."

For years, many Asian-Americans have been convinced that it's harder for them to gain admission to the nation's top colleges.

... The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don't give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What's behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian-American — and is being one a choice?

Olmstead is a freshman at Harvard and a member of HAPA, the Half-Asian People's Association. In high school she had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and scored 2150 out of a possible 2400 on the SAT, which she calls "pretty low."

College applications ask for parent information, so Olmstead knows that admissions officers could figure out a student's background that way. She did write in the word "multiracial" on her own application.

Still, she would advise students with one Asian parent to "check whatever race is not Asian."

"Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs, perfect GPAs, ... so it's hard to let them all in," Olmstead says.

Amalia Halikias is a Yale freshman whose mother was born in America to Chinese immigrants; her father is a Greek immigrant. She also checked only the "white" box on her application.

"As someone who was applying with relatively strong scores, I didn't want to be grouped into that stereotype," Halikias says. "I didn't want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying."

... "If you know you're going to be discriminated against, it's absolutely justifiable to not check the Asian box," says Halikias.

"The whole Tiger Mom stereotype is grounded in truth," says Tao Tao Holmes, a Yale sophomore with a Chinese-born mother and white American father. She did not check "Asian" on her application.

"My math scores aren't high enough for the Asian box," she says. "I say it jokingly, but there is the underlying sentiment of, if I had emphasized myself as Asian, I would have (been expected to) excel more in stereotypically Asian-dominated subjects."

"I was definitely held to a different standard (by my mom), and to different standards than my friends," Holmes says. She sees the same rigorous academic focus among many other students with immigrant parents, even non-Asian ones.

Does Holmes think children of American parents are generally spoiled and lazy by comparison? "That's essentially what I'm trying to say."

Asian students have higher average SAT scores than any other group, including whites. A study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade examined applicants to top colleges from 1997, when the maximum SAT score was 1600 (today it's 2400). Espenshade found that Asian-Americans needed a 1550 SAT to have an equal chance of getting into an elite college as white students with a 1410 or black students with an 1100.

Top schools that don't ask about race in admissions process have very high percentages of Asian students. The California Institute of Technology, a private school that chooses not to consider race, is about one-third Asian. (Thirteen percent of California residents have Asian heritage.) The University of California-Berkeley, which is forbidden by state law to consider race in admissions, is more than 40 percent Asian — up from about 20 percent before the law was passed.

Steven Hsu, a physics professor at the University of Oregon and a vocal critic of current admissions policies, says there is a clear statistical case that discrimination exists.

"The actual dynamics of how it happens are really quite subtle," he says, mentioning factors like horse-trading among admissions officers for their favorite candidates.

Also, "when Asians are the largest group on campus, I can easily imagine a fund-raiser saying, 'This is jarring to our alumni,'" Hsu says. Noting that most Ivy League schools have roughly the same percentage of Asians, he wonders if "that's the maximum number where diversity is still good, and it's not, 'we're being overwhelmed by the yellow horde.'"

... Kara Miller helped read applications for the Yale admissions office when she was an undergraduate there, and participated in meetings where admissions decisions were made. She says it often felt like Asians were held to a higher standard.

"Asian kids know that when you look at the average SAT for the school, they need to add 50 or 100 to it. If you're Asian, that's what you'll need to get in," says Miller, now an English professor at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

... Hsu, the physics professor, says that if the current admissions policies continue, it will become more common for Asian students to avoid identifying themselves as such, and schools will have to react.

"They'll have to decide: A half-Asian kid, what is that? I don't think they really know." ...

DNA data deluge

2011-11-30T19:14:00.000-08:00

NYTimes reports: DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data. Spooks and other scientists have similar problems. See also here.

NYTimes: BGI, based in China, is the world’s largest genomics research institute, with 167 DNA sequencers producing the equivalent of 2,000 human genomes a day.

BGI churns out so much data that it often cannot transmit its results to clients or collaborators over the Internet or other communications lines because that would take weeks. Instead, it sends computer disks containing the data, via FedEx.

“It sounds like an analog solution in a digital age,” conceded Sifei He, the head of cloud computing for BGI, formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. But for now, he said, there is no better way.

The field of genomics is caught in a data deluge. DNA sequencing is becoming faster and cheaper at a pace far outstripping Moore’s law, which describes the rate at which computing gets faster and cheaper.

The result is that the ability to determine DNA sequences is starting to outrun the ability of researchers to store, transmit and especially to analyze the data.

... The cost of sequencing a human genome — all three billion bases of DNA in a set of human chromosomes — plunged to $10,500 last July from $8.9 million in July 2007, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

That is a decline by a factor of more than 800 over four years. By contrast, computing costs would have dropped by perhaps a factor of four in that time span.

The lower cost, along with increasing speed, has led to a huge increase in how much sequencing data is being produced. World capacity is now 13 quadrillion DNA bases a year, an amount that would fill a stack of DVDs two miles high, according to Michael Schatz, assistant professor of quantitative biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.

There will probably be 30,000 human genomes sequenced by the end of this year, up from a handful a few years ago, according to the journal Nature. And that number will rise to millions in a few years.

In a few cases, human genomes are being sequenced to help diagnose mysterious rare diseases and treat patients. But most are being sequenced as part of studies. The federally financed Cancer Genome Atlas, for instance, is sequencing the genomes of thousands of tumors and of healthy tissue from the same people, looking for genetic causes of cancer. ...

Here's a slide I sometimes use in talks.

Higher education: signaling vs learning

2011-11-29T19:32:00.001-08:00

This paper presents evidence in favor of the signaling (as opposed to human capital building) model of elite higher education. Of course, the data is quite crude and different fields may tilt more in one direction or the other. For example, I think most science and engineering students who attend MIT or Caltech are doing it because they feel it will develop their human capital (i.e., they will learn more and receive a perhaps painfully rigorous education) than because of the signaling value, although the latter is non-negligible.

See earlier posts here.

Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role of Selectivity and GPA

Brad Hershbein - The University of Michigan
October, 2011

Abstract
Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multi-dimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students' choices of effort and firms' wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages. Using five data sets that span the early 1960s through the late 2000s, I show that the data support the predictions of the signaling model, with support growing stronger over time. I also discuss alternative explanations, including di fferent types of human capital models; provide robustness checks; and relate the findings to both the returns-to-college-quality and employer learning literatures.

From the introduction:

Recently, there has been a sizable interest in the return to attending a more selective or prestigious college. Students who attend more prestigious schools earn more over their lifetime, on average, than those who attend less selective schools, but the mechanism underlying this premium is not well understood. In particular, there is disagreement over whether the earnings di fference is primarily due to the college itself or whether it is driven by unobserved student characteristics. The first of these channels is consistent with human capital theory -- attending the more selective school actually makes the worker more productive -- and the second more closely accords with models of signaling -- more innately productive workers are more likely to attend more selective schools.

[It's also possible that attending the right school gives access to networks and valuable information about career paths; see here.]

Given that annual U.S. higher education expenditures are over $460 billion, but per-student expenditures increase dramatically with college selectivity, understanding why students who attend selective colleges earn more over their lifetimes has dramatic implications for how those dollars are optimally allocated. Recent theoretical work seeking to explain why students increasingly sort by ability across college selectivities suggests a positive complementarity in human capital acquisition between students' ability and the greater resources available at selective colleges, but these models have received little empirical attention. On the other hand, the relatively few studies that have attempted to measure student learning in college have found little di fference across di fferent types of colleges once pre-college characteristics are controlled for (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005; Arum and Roksa 2011). While it is not clear whether the "learning" measured in these studies is of the type that fi rms would care about, this evidence suggests that the return to selectivity is unlikely to be due to human capital alone and that the signaling mechanism is worth a more careful investigation.

Success in legal careers: status, credentials and grades

2011-11-25T17:22:00.000-08:00

This detailed study concludes that law school grades, not prestige, have the strongest correlation with career success. I'd be interested in reactions from attorneys to these results. See earlier post credentialistm and elite performance, and links therein. Compare to success of graduate programs in physics in placing theoreticians.

The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness and School Performance Shape Legal Careers

Richard Sander and Jane Yakowitz

Abstract
If we study the forty thousand law graduates who join the legal profes- sion each year, how well can we predict their future careers? How much of their future is predicted by their social class? The law school they attend? Their law school grades? This paper undertakes the first in-depth examination of these questions. Drawing on several large and recently-released datasets, we examine the role of class, school prestige and law school grades on the career earnings of lawyers and the success of big firm associates in becoming partners. We find that social class strongly conditions who goes to law school, but no longer predicts much about post-graduate outcomes. Law school prestige is important, but it is generally trumped by law school performance (as measured by law school grades). Law school grades reflect both personal characteristics not well captured by pre-law credentials, and one’s relative position in a law school class as measured by pre-law credentials. Our findings suggest that there is little empirical basis for the overwhelming importance students assign to “eliteness” in choosing a law school. [italics mine]

Here is part of Table 10, which displays the deduced impacts of law school eliteness and grade performance in law school on long term career success (earnings) from a large database of Chicago lawyers. In the 1994 survey grades had much larger impact than school prestige. (Click for larger version.)

The authors' comments on this table:

Of course, since there is significant error in the measurement of law school grades, these models almost certainly understate their full impor- tance.38 Moreover, since we are here considering long-term career outcomes – not short-term recruitment – the effect of law school performance is not simply a credentialing effect of high grades leading to attractive job offers. Something about doing well in law school is strongly associated with lasting career success, and proves to have more efficacy than law school eliteness.

The eliteness of one’s law school is, compared with grades, a relatively weak explanatory factor in the 1994 equation. 39 And while the grade coef- ficients are biased in a way that understates their actual influence, the law school coefficients are almost surely overstated. The Chicago Lawyers equations do not include measures of pre-law credentials, such as LSAT scores and undergraduate grades. Since these factors do predict income for broad cross-sections of lawyers, and since the tight hierarchy of law school admissions makes law school eliteness a close proxy for student credentials, an unknown but probably large part of what seems to be explained by school eliteness is actually just a measure of pre-law credentials.

Is it possible that there are two paths to high income legal careers: BigLaw (BL) and RegionalLaw (RL)? Perhaps LS prestige is a big factor for the former and less so for the latter, which draws from regional schools (i.e. state flagship campus). Top partners in RL might make almost as much as those in BL, so that grades (which predict both BL and RL success) have a higher income correlation than LS reputation alone, which only manifests in BL.

The utility of grades or class rank as predictors does not surprise me, as they measure a combination of ability, willingness to work hard, and motivation. See here for results on high school GPA and SAT as predictors of college GPA. However, some fields seem to have ability thresholds that can't be surmounted through hard work.

Godel's proof, compressed

2011-11-23T09:39:00.000-08:00

I found this here, but it is originally due to Raymond Smullyan. I first learned about Godel's theorem when I read Douglas Hofstader's book Godel, Escher, Bach in high school. I still remember lugging the thick volume around in my backpack, and working through the early chapters on predicate logic. This treatment is much more compact! :^)

We have some sort of machine that prints out statements in some sort of language. It needn't be a statement-printing machine exactly; it could be some sort of technique for taking statements and deciding if they are true. But let's think of it as a machine that prints out statements.

In particular, some of the statements that the machine might (or might not) print look like these:

P*x (which means that the machine will print x)
NP*x (which means that the machine will never print x)
PR*x (which means that the machine will print xx)
NPR*x (which means that the machine will never print xx)

For example, NPR*FOO means that the machine will never print FOOFOO. NP*FOOFOO means the same thing. So far, so good.

Now, let's consider the statement NPR*NPR*. This statement asserts that the machine will never print NPR*NPR*.

Either the machine prints NPR*NPR*, or it never prints NPR*NPR*.

If the machine prints NPR*NPR*, it has printed a false statement. But if the machine never prints NPR*NPR*, then NPR*NPR* is a true statement that the machine never prints.

So either the machine sometimes prints false statements, or there are true statements that it never prints.

So any machine that prints only true statements must fail to print some true statements.

Or conversely, any machine that prints every possible true statement must print some false statements too.

Talk cancelled

2011-11-22T18:37:00.000-08:00

This talk has been cancelled, for complex reasons that I will not discuss.

Podcast roundup: November 2011

2011-11-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

Gary Taubes discusses fat, sugar, cholesterol and nutrition on Econtalk. See also medical science?

Progress in the age of Obama -- Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel.

Strongly Coupled Components -- interviews with mathematicians.

The Continental-Analytic Split in philosophy.

Is the wavefunction real?

2011-11-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

This is a nice result.

I haven't checked the calculations, but I like the logic very much. I'm kicking myself for not having tried harder to precisely formalize what the authors refer to as the "statistical interpretation" (note: this is quite a confusing terminology for most people -- see Further comments below) of the quantum state. Apparently, once you formalize this interpretation, it is easy to prove that it has to disagree with the predictions of ordinary quantum theory.

This "statistical interpretation" (e.g., that the wavefunction, or quantum formalism, only describes the knowledge state of the observer and does not correspond to physical reality) is the last shaky dodge of those who are against the reality (or correspondence to reality) of the wavefunction. The latter has always seemed to me the natural first interpretation of the formalism, subject, of course, to further analysis.

The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically

Matthew F. Pusey, Jonathan Barrett, Terry Rudolph

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3328

Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state represents. There are at least two opposing schools of thought, each almost as old as quantum theory itself. One is that a pure state is a physical property of system, much like position and momentum in classical mechanics. Another is that even a pure state has only a statistical significance, akin to a probability distribution in statistical mechanics. Here we show that, given only very mild assumptions, the statistical interpretation of the quantum state is inconsistent with the predictions of quantum theory. This result holds even in the presence of small amounts of experimental noise, and is therefore amenable to experimental test using present or near-future technology. If the predictions of quantum theory are confirmed, such a test would show that distinct quantum states must correspond to physically distinct states of reality.

Here's what Nature News had to say:

Quantum theorem shakes foundations: The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers.

Further comments:

There seems to be widespread misunderstanding of what the authors are trying to do in this paper.

They are not trying to refute qm or the standard rules of calculation (e.g., Born rule). Perhaps their use of the term "statistical interpretation" is unfortunate because some people seem to have jumped to the conclusion that they claim to prove qm is deterministic or non-probabilistic. That is not the case.

They are addressing a particular interpretation of qm. This interpretation says: there is an underlying physical reality, but the state Psi only describes an observer's knowledge about that underlying reality. Psi is not itself a direct representation of that reality. ("Psi is not real".) I would classify this as a variant of Copenhagen; its proponents sometimes refer to it as a "Bayesian" or "Epistemic" interpretation. I prefer to call it the "Mysterian" interpretation: reality is some vast mysterious thing (never specified!), Psi only characterizes the observer's mental state; collapse of the wavefunction is simply a Bayesian update of the mental state.

Mysterian/Bayesian: "The reduction of the wavefunction takes place in the consciousness of the observer ... because the state is a construct of the observer's mind and not an objective property of the physical system."

Many Worlder: "The wavefunction is real (i.e., a direct representation of physical reality), but it does not collapse."

Note, both groups try to avoid the possibility that Psi is real and collapses. But see Weinberg's recent preprint for an attempt to understand that possibility: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6462

A modern proponent of the Mysterian point of view is Chris Fuchs. I would be very interested to hear his reaction to this paper. But Rob Spekkens (quoted in the Nature article) also thinks along these lines, and he seems to believe that the (lambda, q) formalization of Mysterianism captures something useful. I am still pondering it myself.

Technically, the (lambda, q) formalization describes a model in which (i) there is an underlying reality (some Mysterians apparently do not actually believe this) and (ii) the state vector Psi does not describe the underlying reality but rather an observer's knowledge about it.

The fact that a given underlying reality lambda has probability q of being consistent with two different preparations of a state, which each yield different pure states phi_0 and phi_1 (their notation), is meant to capture (i) and (ii) above. Remember that to a Mysterian the pure state is a description of a state of knowledge, not of reality. So nonzero q means that two different states of knowledge (preparations) are consistent with the same underlying state of reality.

These Fuchs slides might be of use in understanding the mysterious Mysterians: Being Bayesian in a Quantum World (I am a Bayesian, who lives in a quantum world, but not a Mysterian :-)

This blog post by Matt Leifer is very clear and gives the context for the paper in the qm foundations subfield.

Predictive power of early childhood IQ, part 2

2011-11-16T10:40:00.000-08:00

I came across this table in Intelligence by N. Brody. Berkeley Growth Study (61 participants).

See earlier post predictive power of early childhood iq.

Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture

2011-11-16T08:57:00.000-08:00

Nice discussion on Econtalk. I suspect Baumeister has slightly stronger opinions than he expressed to Russ.

Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and the author of Is There Anything Good About Men talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the differences between men and women in cultural and economic areas. Baumeister argues that men aren't superior to women nor are women superior to men. Rather there are some things men are better at while women excel at a different set of tasks and that these tradeoffs are a product of evolution and cultural pressure. He argues that evolutionary pressure has created different distributions of talent for men and women in a wide variety of areas. He argues that other differences in outcomes are not due to innate ability differences but rather come from different tastes or preferences.

The podcast got me through 30 pullups, 100 pushups, situps, kettlebells and cycling :-)

Sonmi 451

2011-11-14T18:55:00.000-08:00

My vote for best recent dystopian fiction featuring genetic engineering goes to the An Orison Of Sonmi 451 chapters of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Can't wait to see the big budget movie. Will they retain the Korean peninsula setting?

Honorable mention: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities. This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.

“Comfort”? How do you mean? To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes. ...

Did your second day outside provide any answers? Some: but yet more surprises. The first stood across the anteroom from my cot as I awoke. A pylonic man, over three meters tall and dressed in an orange zipsuit, was studying the bookshelves. His face, neck, and hands were scalded red, burnt black, and patched pale, but he did not seem to suffer pain. His collar confirmed he was a fabricant, but I could not guess his stemtype: lips genomed out, ears protected by hornvalves, and a voice deeper than any I heard before or since. “No stimulin here. You wake when you wake. Especially if your postgrad is as lazy as Boom-Sook Kim. Xec postgrads are the worst. They have their asses wiped for them. From kindergarten to euthanasium.” With a giant, two-thumbed hand, he indicated a blue zipsuit half the size of his. “For you, little sister.” As I changed from my Papa Song’s uniform into my new garment, I asked if he had been sent by a seer. “No seers, either,” said the burnt giant. “Your postgrad and mine are friends. Boom-Sook called yesterday. Complained about your unxpected delivery. I wished to visit you pre-curfew. But Genome Surgery postgrads work late. Unlike slackers here in Psychogenomics. I’m Wing027. Let’s find out why you’re here.” ...

What sort of fabricant was Wing-027? A militiaman? No, a disasterman. He boasted he could operate in deadlands so infected or radioactive that purebloods perish there like bacteria in bleach; that his brain had only minor genomic refinements; and that disastermen’s basic orientation provides a more thoro education than most pureblood universities. Finally, he bared his hideously burnt forearm: “Show me a pureblood who could stand this! My postgrad’s Ph.D. is tissue flameproofing.”

Wing027’s xplanation of deadlands appalled me, but the disasterman anticipated their approach with relish. The day when all Nea So Copros is deadlanded, he told me, will be the day fabricants become the new purebloods. ...

Huamdonggil is a noxious maze of low, crooked ramshacks, flophouses, pawnshops, drug bars, and comfort hives, covering perhaps five square miles southeast of Old Seoul Transit Station. Its streets are too narrow for fords to enter; its alleys reek of waste and sewage. ShitCorp goes nowhere near that quarter. Hae-Joo left the ford in a lockup and warned me to keep my head hooded: fabricants stolen here end up in brothels, made serviceable after clumsy surgery. Purebloods slumped in doorways, skin enflamed by prolonged xposure to the city’s scalding rain. One boy lapped water from a puddle on his hands and knees. “Migrants with enceph or leadlung,” Hae-Joo told me. “Hospitals drain their Souls until they’ve got only enough dollars for a euthanasia jab—or a ride to Huamdonggil. These poor bastards made the wrong choice.”

I could not understand why migrants fled Production Zones for such a squalid fate. Hae-Joo listed malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop genomes, parasites, encroaching deadlands, and a natural desire to better the lives of their children. Papa Song Corp, he assured me, seems humane if compared to factories these migrants ran away from. Traffickers promise it rains dollars in the Twelve Cities, and migrants yearn to believe it; the truth never filters back, for traffickers operate only one way. Hae-Joo steered me away from a meowing two-headed rat. “They bite.”

I asked why the Juche tolerates this in its second capital.

Every conurb, my guide answered, has a chemical toilet where the city’s unwanted human waste disintegrates quietly, but not quite invisibly. It motivates the downstrata: “Work, spend, work,” say slums like Huamdonggil, “or you, too, will end your life here.” Moreover, entrepreneurs take advantage of the legal vaccuum to erect ghoulish pleasurezones for upstrata bored with more respectable quarters. Huamdonggil can thus pay its way in taxes and bribes. MediCorp opens a weekly clinic for dying untermensch to xchange any healthy body parts they may have for a sac of euthanaze. OrganiCorp has a lucrative contract with the city to send in a daily platoon of immune-genomed fabricants, similar to disastermen, to mop up the dead before the flies hatch. Hae-Joo then told me to stay silent; we had reached our destination.

More excerpts here. See also this.

Paris Review interview with David Mitchell.

Veritas

2011-11-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

Perhaps we will meet the ghosts of Stephen J. Gould.

Good riddance, JoePa

2011-11-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

I've always hated Joe Paterno and Penn State's holier than thou sham. Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top.

NYTimes: ... I have a hard time understanding why a 28 year old man, the grad student, did not go straight into that shower and rescue the kid. He is a coward. Law, lawsuits and all the oversight in the world is valueless unless people step up. This creep Sandusky was “caught” several times, in each case the so called men who witnessed it, quietly back away. Shame on them all. Shame on Mr. Paterno whose god status created the environment.

Paterno admits he was told by the assistant mentioned above that he saw former defensive coordinator Sandusky having anal sex with a naked 10 year old boy in the showers. Paterno reports it to superiors but doesn't follow up further and Sandusky retains an office in the athletic complex. The graduate assistant, a former Penn State QB, is now an assistant coach, so Paterno can hardly claim he didn't find the charge credible. This was definitely a coverup that extended over a decade, and JoePa was involved.

I wonder how the Penn State players feel about using the shower facilities in the Lasch Building (football complex).

Sandusky Grand Jury Presentment.

"When we stood at childhood's gate, Shapeless in the hands of fate, .... May no act of ours bring shame"

The Penn State Alma Mater

For the glory of old State,
For her founders strong and great,
For the future that we wait,
Raise the song, raise the song.

Sing our love and loyalty,
Sing our hopes that, bright and free,
Rest, O Mother dear, with thee,
All with thee, all with thee.

(Softly)

When we stood at childhood's gate,
Shapeless in the hands of fate,
Thou didst mold us, dear old State,
Dear old State, dear old State.

(Louder)

May no act of ours bring shame
To one heart that loves thy name,
May our lives but swell thy fame,
Dear old State, dear old State.

Generation gap

2011-11-07T07:20:00.001-08:00

Look for intergenerational conflict to get worse as more boomers retire. Figure via Atlantic Monthly. 2001 net worth by age group.

OW! Learning can hurt

2011-11-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

Two good articles on the state of higher education. The first dares broach the "higher education bubble" question.

NY Review of Books: ... In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.

Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

... Is this a crisis? Arum and Roksa say no, since students and their parents continue to seek and pay for places at colleges and universities, and government and graduate schools continue to accept their products, and corporations continue to hire them (and to spend more than $50 billion a year to train their employees in the skills they need). But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact. [italics mine]

This NYTimes article notes that, gee, STEM majors are hard and have high attrition rates. Readers immediately point out that the incentives for slogging through a difficult science or engineering curriculum aren't great. Better to work on your "soft skills" and leave the hard stuff for the suckers.

It's also about career path. Why bust your hump in engineering, when a degree in finance will land you a 6-figures job on Wall St., and a shot at 7 or 8 figures, for about the same effort? Especially knowing that corporate America considers engineers to be discardable, and does not hesitate to offshore engineering jobs to India or the Philippines. Some of the CEOs who whine the loudest about shortage of STEM graduates are the biggest culprits in making engineering an undesirable profession.

I am a foreigner. I have gone to undergrad back home for a Computer Science major. I have then come here to the US to get my MBA - at what is considered a top level institution.

What I saw among my fellow students who were American- those purported to be the best and the brightest, the cream of the crop - shocked me.

Grown men and women who are incapable of doing simple fractions, or understand the concept of percentage increase; let alone integrate a function, or indeed, understand what an integral is.

"Science is hard"? Well, Tough Luck, kids. Life ain't easy. The reason that people drop out of science classes is because they're spoiled brats, who, at the age of 18, lack the willpower to actually pursue something that pays off later. I endured 400 person Linear Algebra lessons in which I understood not a thing, calculus classes that made my eyes bleed, and final exams in which I got the grade of 13 out of 100.

Did I drop out and go study English Lit, or Poli Sci? Did I go and complain that "math is too hard"? No. Like the Indian or Slovenian kid that's busy kicking your American tush in the "Getting stuff done" department I grit my teeth and persevered.

The problem is not so much that kids drop out of math, it is [where they] drop out TO. American children are coddled, and told that it's confidence and people skills that matter, and that's what gets you through in life, and it's OK if you can't tell me what a common denominator is in fractions, because someone else is going to do all the "hard stuff".

Don't get me wrong: Soft skills and people skills matter a lot. They do. They really do, that's why American business culture is still among the top in the world: But make no mistake, the pendulum has swung so far towards the "soft skills" side of the equation that "hard skills" are simply impossible to come by.

The burden of students

2011-11-03T12:07:00.001-07:00

I always enjoyed interacting with Sidney Coleman (sadly, now deceased) when I was a postdoc. I was quite pleased to find this interview, part of the AIP Oral History project.

His views about working with students are not surprising to me, despite the high quality of Harvard PhD students. The gap in brainpower between Sidney and even an exceptional graduate student might be vast. It's worth noting that Sidney had a large number of PhD students who became prominent theorists.

I often make the analogy between teaching (or training PhD students) and pushups or running. Perhaps unpleasant while you are doing it, but (hopefully) it makes you stronger. Certainly I learn a lot from teaching, if only from reviewing the material in preparation for lectures. If the students are exceptionally good, I might even learn things from questions asked in class.

But you do enjoy working with students, or do you?

Coleman: No. I hate it. You do it as part of the job. Well, that's of course false...or maybe more true than false when I say I hate it. Occasionally there's a student who is a joy to work with. But I certainly would be just as happy if I had no graduate students. There are plenty of colleagues around here whom I can work with. There are plenty of research fellows; junior faculty. This is true all through the Cambridge area. There's not only Harvard, there are people to work with at MIT, at Brandeis, and there are some good people at places like Northeastern... places loaded with physicists to collaborate with, to talk about physics ideas with, who are ready and KNOW basically how to do research. You know who's good and who's bad. It's not a question of their being embryonically possibly good or possibly rotten. So certainly if I want physicists to collaborate with I don't have to have graduate students. Occasionally there is a graduate student who is a joy to collaborate with. Both David (Politzer) and Eric (Weinberg) were of this kind, but they were essentially almost mature physicists. They were very bright by the time they came to me. In general, working with a graduate student is like teaching a course. It's tedious, unpleasant work. A pain in the neck. You do it because you're paid to do it. If I weren't paid to do it I certainly would never do it.

Interview with Dr. Sidney Coleman by Katherine Sopka at Harvard Physics Department, Cambridge, Massachusetts January 18, 1977.

My Beautiful Genome

2011-11-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

A nice interview with science writer Lone Frank about her book My Beautiful Genome.

Click below for audio.

Festival della Scienza Genova and Italy: final thoughts

2011-10-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

Here are the "official" video links from the Festival della Scienza in Genova: my public lecture , interview.

I had a wonderful time in Genova. My visit wasn't very long, because I had to come back to teach.

On the trip I spoke to quite a few young Italians (young here is probably, err, 35 and below), who all expressed pessimism about the future of the country and the economy. On the other hand, at the fancy dinners with Genovese families, I met a number of wealthy business types who reassured me that Italy would be fine and would have no trouble servicing its debt.

On Friday equity markets rallied in relief after the announcement of the latest plan to deal with the Euro debt crisis. However, ominously, bond investors demanded higher rates for Italian 10 year debt.

WSJ: ... Those sorts of concerns played out in Italy's €7.935 billion debt sale on Friday. On each of the four bond issues it sold, Italy was forced to pay higher yields than in the recent past. Most significantly, 10-year debt—a market benchmark—was sold at a yield 6.06%, up from 5.86% only a month ago.

"With a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio and 10-year Italian bonds yielding roughly 6%, they can't do that forever or the borrowing costs will get to an unsustainable level," said Eric Stein, portfolio manager at the Eaton Vance Global Macro Absolute Return Fund. "As your rates go up, it means you're paying more and more to service your debt, and your whole debt dynamics become harder and harder and harder.

As often noted by professionals, equity markets are driven by emotion, whereas bond markets are driven by quantitative analysis.

Steve Jobs, intuition, and genius

2011-10-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Walter Isaacson, biographer of both Einstein and Steve Jobs, on smarts, intuition and innovation.

NYTimes: ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.

But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.

He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”

Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)

... Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.

Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.

In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”

The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.

... China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.

The top 1 percent by profession

2011-10-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

Notice anything funny about the trends? Source: tax data (complete tables at the link; what I display below is truncated). Click for larger versions.

Here is the share of national income by profession.

More interesting would be the top .1 percent, because secular growth in financier representation would be even more apparent.

Here are two more just for fun.

The illusion of skill

2011-10-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

Daniel Kahneman claims that differences in the performance of professional investors are mostly due to luck, whereas compensation is awarded as if differences are due to skill. Most alpha is fake alpha.

This of course raises all sorts of questions about why such people are allowed to become so extravagantly wealthy. The usual argument is that their investment decisions lead to more efficient resource allocation in the economy. (They are a "necessary evil" of a capitalist market system that benefits all of us :-) But if the decisions of the highest paid professionals are no better than those of average professionals, we could replace the services of the highest earners at much lower cost (or cap their salaries or impose high marginal tax rates) without negatively impacting the overall quality of decisions or the efficiency of the economy.

The article is worth reading in its entirety.

NYTimes: ... No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals performing a task that was difficult but not impossible, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses. We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said, “not very high” or “performance certainly fluctuates.” It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.

What we told the directors of the firm was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign that they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analyzed their own results, and they were certainly sophisticated enough to appreciate their implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I am quite sure that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions — and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem — are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide general facts that people will ignore if they conflict with their personal experience.

The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their personal experience of exercising careful professional judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical result. When we were done, one executive I dined with the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, “I have done very well for the firm, and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, privately: Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?

From the comments.

If you read the whole article, you see that Kahneman does believe in skill. For example, his studies show that some doctors are better at diagnosis than others. I am also sure that some entrepreneurs or some physicists or some athletes are better than others. (Although in the case of entrepreneurs it would be very hard to demonstrate statistically since outcomes are noisy and the number of attempts per entrepreneur is relatively small.)

But there may be areas where *the differences between high level professionals* (e.g., people who have been hired to run money, have top MBAs or graduate degrees, etc.) are statistically seen to be mostly due to luck. This has already been convincingly demonstrated for pundits or analysts of complex world events by Tetlock's studies of expertise. (You can find several posts on this blog on the topic.) Whether it's true of money managers (or even big company CEOs) is controversial. If you argue the skill side, I'd like to see *your* statistical evidence, not just repetition of your priors (again and again).

Expert predictions

In all areas of human activity, even the skill dominated ones, luck plays a big factor. This is a good argument for redistribution -- almost every successful person owes some of their success to luck.

and

It seems to me that the 20th century trend in democracies is toward greater redistribution: social safety nets, guaranteed minimum income, etc. People have been conditioned to believe these are aspects of a just society.

The question is: what is the optimum level of redistribution? (Given a particular utility function for society.)

One argument is that we have to let the rich get rich in order to have strong economic growth. Too much redistribution means a smaller pie to split. But the Illusion of Skill argument (if correct) suggests that for some activities like finance a high marginal tax rate (say, which kicks in above the income of the *average* finance professional; this would then only affect the top earning financiers who, according to the argument are not adding any real value that the average guys can't also provide) would not negatively affect economic efficiency.

If people irrationally and incorrectly believe that only Harvard MDs are capable of treating pneumonia, and bid up their compensation to exorbitant levels (levels so high that the Harvard MDs begin exerting financial and political control over society as a whole), wouldn't it be better for society to impose a high tax rate on Harvard MDs, which kicks in above the income of other doctors with similar credentials (but who are not beneficiaries of the irrational belief)?

Festival della Scienza Genova: videos and photos

2011-10-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

Video of my public lecture and an interview, both available in English or Italian translation. The slides for my talk are here.

Some more photos below.

An interview with Rai (Italian version of BBC). Matt Ridley (author and science writer) was also interviewed (the woman sitting between us is the translator).

More views of Genova.

Foto di Genova 2

2011-10-23T01:06:00.000-07:00

The lecture hall. See here for video and a short interview. (Not up at the moment but should appear later today.)

Translator booth. Most people listened via headset.

The interview studio.

Plaza outside the Palazzo Ducale.

At the pier.

View from the hills. Each night the speakers have been invited to dinners hosted by local Genovese families "of repute" :-) Last night's dinner was one of the best meals I can remember!

Foto di Genova

2011-10-22T02:59:00.000-07:00

Views from my hotel in central Genova:

Cattedrale di San Lorenzo and Via San Lorenzo:

Palazzo Ducale, where I will give my lecture later today:

IQ malleability

2011-10-21T05:47:00.000-07:00

This paper got a lot of attention in the press. I don't have time to discuss it in detail, but it is worth emphasizing that the correlation between scores on WISC and WAIS for the n=33 subjects was around .8 -- typical for two different IQ tests administered years apart. (Note, the same test -- e.g., the SAT -- administered twice with a gap of 1 year might have correlation of .9 or even .95.) In other words, knowing an individual's WISC score gives you good power to predict their eventual WAIS score, but with a big chunk of variance (say, 30-40% of total variance) still unaccounted for. In light of this, a 1 SD shift in score is to be expected for a reasonable fraction of participants, as found in the study. What is a bit more novel is that they correlated the score shifts to actual MRI observations of the brain.

(One might also interpret this as saying that the residual uncertainty in "true g score" is a good chunk of an SD even after an individual is carefully tested using WAIS or WISC; personally I don't think "g" is much better defined than at this level of accuracy.)

I am very jet-lagged right now, so I hope what I wrote makes sense :-)

Verbal and non-verbal intelligence changes in the teenage brain (Nature):

... Our participants were 33 healthy and neurologically normal adolescents with a deliberately wide and heterogeneous mix of abilities (see Supplementary Information for details and the implications of our sampling for the generalizability of our conclusions). They were first tested in 2004 (‘time 1’) when they were 12–16 yr old (mean, 14.1 yr). Testing was repeated in 2007/2008 (‘time 2’) when the same indivi- duals were 15–20 yr old (mean, 17.7 yr). See Table 1 for further details of the participants. During the intervening years, there were no testing sessions, and participants and their parents had no knowledge that they would be invited back for further testing. On both test occasions, each participant had a structural brain scan using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and had their IQ measured using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) at time 1 and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-III) at time 2 (see Supplementary Information for details). These two widely used, age-appropriate assess- ments5 produce strongly correlated results at a given time point, con- sistent with them measuring highly similar constructs6. Scores on individual subtests are standardized against age-specific norms and then grouped to produce separate measures of verbal IQ (VIQ) and performance IQ (PIQ), with VIQ encompassing those tests most related to verbal skills and PIQ being more independent of verbal skills. Nevertheless, VIQ and PIQ scores are very significantly correlated with each other across participants: in our sample, the correlations between VIQ and PIQ were r50.51 at time 1 and r50.55 at time 2 (in both cases, n 5 33; P , 0.01). Full-scale IQ (FSIQ) is the composite of VIQ and PIQ and is regarded as the best measure of general intellectual capacity (the g factor) that has previously been shown to correlate with brain size and cortical thickness in a wide variety of frontal, parietal and temporal brain regions7,8.

The wide range of abilities in our sample was confirmed as follows: FSIQ ranged from 77 to 135 at time 1 and from 87 to 143 at time 2, with averages of 112 and 113 at times 1 and 2, respectively, and a tight correlation across testing points (r 5 0.79; P , 0.001). Our interest was in the considerable variation observed between testing points at the individual level, which ranged from 220 to 123 for VIQ, 218 to 117 for PIQ and 218 to 121 for FSIQ. Even if the extreme values of the published 90% confidence intervals are used on both occasions, 39% of the sample showed a clear change in VIQ, 21% in PIQ and 33% in FSIQ. In terms of the overall distribution, 21% of our sample showed a shift of at least one population standard deviation (15) in the VIQ measure, and 18% in the PIQ measure. However, only one participant had a shift of this magnitude in both measures, and, for that particip- ant, one measure showed an increase and the other a decrease. This pattern is reflected in the absence of a significant correlation between the change in VIQ and the change in PIQ. The independence of changes in these two measures allows us to investigate the effect of each without confounding influences from the other.

... Using regression analysis, we studied the brain changes associated with a change in VIQ, PIQ or FSIQ (see Methods Summary for details). The results (Fig. 1) showed that changes in VIQ were positively corre- lated with changes in grey matter density (and volume) in a region of the left motor cortex that is activated by the articulation of speech10. Conversely, changes in PIQ were positively correlated with grey matter density in the anterior cerebellum (lobule IV), which is associated with motor movements of the hand

Tall and good looking

2011-10-21T05:31:00.001-07:00

There's an interesting discussion of height and selection at Razib's blog Gene Expression. I can think of lots of plausible tradeoffs related to greater height -- increased calorie requirements, perhaps not so adaptive for females, effects on metabolism or other body systems, etc. But what about facial attractiveness or symmetry? Every so often I see a really good looking face and the effect is very striking. Surely there are lots of benefits from this, but are there any plausible genetic costs? I would guess that evolution can tweak facial bone structure without affecting the brain or other bodily systems... If so, why aren't we all much better looking? :-)

See earlier post female faces.

[Posted from CDG in Paris; see you in Genova soon!]

Ideograms, alphabets and civilizations

2011-10-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

As someone who never mastered them, I've always felt oppressed by Chinese characters. Perhaps my kids will succeed where I failed :-)

Bertrand Russell reflects on ideograms, alphabets and civilizations in The Problem of China. (Note, technically Chinese is neither wholly ideographic or logographic.)

As everyone knows, the Chinese do not have letters, as we do, but symbols for whole words. This has, of course, many inconveniences: it means that, in learning to write, there are an immense number of different signs to be learnt, not only 26 as with us; that there is no such thing as alphabetical order, so that dictionaries, files, catalogues, etc., are difficult to arrange and linotype is impossible; that foreign words, such as proper names and scientific terms, cannot be written down by sound, as in European languages, but have to be represented by some elaborate device.[15] For these reasons, there is a movement for phonetic writing among the more advanced Chinese reformers; and I think the success of this movement is essential if China is to take her place among the bustling hustling nations which consider that they have a monopoly of all excellence. Even if there were no other argument for the change, the difficulty of elementary education, where reading and writing take so long to learn, would be alone sufficient to decide any believer in democracy. For practical purposes, therefore, the movement for phonetic writing deserves support. [Somehow, modern Chinese have achieved nearly 100% literacy despite the difficulty of the writing system.]

There are, however, many considerations, less obvious to a European, which can be adduced in favour of the ideographic system, to which something of the solid stability of the Chinese civilization is probably traceable. To us, it seems obvious that a written word must represent a sound, whereas to the Chinese it represents an idea. We have adopted the Chinese system ourselves as regards numerals; "1922," for example, can be read in English, French, or any other language, with quite different sounds, but with the same meaning. Similarly what is written in Chinese characters can be read throughout China, in spite of the difference of dialects which are mutually unintelligible when spoken. Even a Japanese, without knowing a word of spoken Chinese, can read out Chinese script in Japanese, just as he could read a row of numerals written by an Englishman. And the Chinese can still read their classics, although the spoken language must have changed as much as French has changed from Latin.

The advantage of writing over speech is its greater permanence, which enables it to be a means of communication between different places and different times. But since the spoken language changes from place to place and from time to time, the characteristic advantage of writing is more fully attained by a script which does not aim at representing spoken sounds than by one which does. [Italics mine.]

Speaking historically, there is nothing peculiar in the Chinese method of writing, which represents a stage through which all writing probably passed. Writing everywhere seems to have begun as pictures, not as a symbolic representation of sounds. I understand that in Egyptian hieroglyphics the course of development from ideograms to phonetic writing can be studied. What is peculiar in China is the preservation of the ideographic system throughout thousands of years of advanced civilization—a preservation probably due, at least in part, to the fact that the spoken language is monosyllabic, uninflected and full of homonyms.

As to the way in which the Chinese system of writing has affected the mentality of those who employ it, I find some suggestive reflections in an article published in the Chinese Students' Monthly (Baltimore), for February 1922, by Mr. Chi Li, in an article on "Some Anthropological Problems of China." He says (p. 327):—

Language has been traditionally treated by European scientists as a collection of sounds instead of an expression of something inner and deeper than the vocal apparatus as it should be. The accumulative effect of language-symbols upon one's mental formulation is still an unexploited field. Dividing the world culture of the living races on this basis, one perceives a fundamental difference of its types between the alphabetical users and the hieroglyphic users, each of which has its own virtues and vices. Now, with all respects to alphabetical civilization, it must be frankly stated that it has a grave and inherent defect in its lack of solidity. The most civilized portion under the alphabetical culture is also inhabited by the most fickled people. The history of the Western land repeats the same story over and over again. Thus up and down with the Greeks; up and down with Rome; up and down with the Arabs. The ancient Semitic and Hametic peoples are essentially alphabetic users, and their civilizations show the same lack of solidity as the Greeks and the Romans. Certainly this phenomenon can be partially explained by the extra-fluidity of the alphabetical language which cannot be depended upon as a suitable organ to conserve any solid idea. Intellectual contents of these people may be likened to waterfalls and cataracts, rather than seas and oceans. No other people is richer in ideas than they; but no people would give up their valuable ideas as quickly as they do....

The Chinese language is by all means the counterpart of the alphabetic stock. It lacks most of the virtues that are found in the alphabetic language; but as an embodiment of simple and final truth, it is invulnerable to storm and stress. It has already protected the Chinese civilization for more than forty centuries. It is solid, square, and beautiful, exactly as the spirit of it represents. Whether it is the spirit that has produced this language or whether this language has in turn accentuated the spirit remains to be determined.

Without committing ourselves wholly to the theory here set forth, which is impregnated with Chinese patriotism, we must nevertheless admit that the Westerner is unaccustomed to the idea of "alphabetical civilization" as merely one kind, to which he happens to belong. I am not competent to judge as to the importance of the ideographic script in producing the distinctive characteristics of Chinese civilization, but I have no doubt that this importance is very great, and is more or less of the kind indicated in the above quotation.

Is the Left right?

2011-10-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

When I see someone overcoming their long-held prior beliefs, I pay attention. Someone who sided with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s doesn't have to be a supporter of financiers in 2011.

Note to rabid conservative attack dogs: criticism of the present over-concentration of economic and political power is not equivalent to the rejection of a (well-functioning) free market system.

I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right

It has taken me more than 30 years as a journalist to ask myself this question, but this week I find that I must: is the Left right after all? You see, one of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up.

The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back. Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created. “Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike. ...

A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror. Working people wanted to throw off the chains that Karl Marx had claimed were shackling them – and join the bourgeoisie which he hated. Their analysis of their situation was essentially correct. The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.

... It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few. The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off. The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.

This column’s mantra about the credit crunch is that Everything Is Different Now. One thing that is different is that people in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order. They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism. They merely feel gloomy and suspicious. But they ask the simple question, “What's in it for me?”, and they do not hear a good answer.

... The greatest capitalist country in history is now dependent on other people’s capital to survive. In such circumstances, Western democracy starts to feel like a threatened luxury. We can wave banners about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but they tend to say, in smaller print, “Made in China”.

As for the plight of the eurozone, this could have been designed by a Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works. A single currency is created. A single bank controls it. No democratic institution with any authority watches over it, and when the zone’s borrowings run into trouble, elected governments must submit to almost any indignity rather than let bankers get hurt. What about the workers? They must lose their jobs in Porto and Piraeus and Punchestown and Poggibonsi so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.

When we look at the Arab Spring, we tend complacently to tell ourselves that the people on the streets all want the freedom we have got. Well, our situation is certainly better than theirs. But I doubt if Western leadership looks to a protester in Tahrir Square as it did to someone knocking down the Berlin Wall in 1989. We are bust – both actually and morally. ...

To the Barricades!

2011-10-17T13:51:00.001-07:00

New Yorker economics correspondent John Cassidy blogs:

TOP TEN UNLIKELY OCCUPY WALL STREET SUPPORTERS

(click through for links to the source of each quote)

10) Henry Blodget: Disgraced Wall Street analyst turned online media mogul empathizes with the mob. Provides handy charts to back up case.

9) Suze Orman: Schoolmarmish personal-finance maven says banks deserve to be criticized. Grades OWS as “approved.”

8) Deepak Chopra: New Age guru leads protesters in a group meditation. Tells them to go to place of “compassion, centered equanimity, and creativity.”

7) Larry Fink: Head of world’s biggest asset-management firm says demonstrators “are not lazy people sitting around looking for something to do.” (Not to be confused with the photographer Larry Fink, who also supports the protests.)

6) Bill Gross: Manager of world’s biggest bond fund says it’s no surprise the 99% is fighting back “after 30 years of being shot at.”

5) Charles Moore: Tory sage and official biographer of Mrs. Thatcher says he is starting to think the left “might actually be right.”

4) Alec Baldwin: Actor and Capital One front man tweets support and advice to protesters. (Not clear if he’s donated the fees from his ads to OWS, though.)

3) Jeffrey Sachs: Columbia economist and former godfather of free-market shock therapy visits Zuccotti Square and tells protesters they are on right track.

2) Vikram Pandit: Citigroup chairman says “trust has been broken” between Wall Street and Main Street. Offers to meet with demonstrators.

1) Ben Bernanke: Republican-appointed Fed chairman says he “can’t blame” protesters for taking to the streets.

Links 10.14.2011

2011-10-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

New Yorker: in search of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

BBC In Our Time: the Ming voyages.

Financial Times: "The reputation of economists, never high, has been a casualty of the global crisis ..." See also here.

Steve Weinberg on his work as a JASON

BusinessInsider: 15 charts on US wealth and income inequality (the ugly truth).

NYTimes: "... participants judged women made up in varying intensities of luminance contrast (fancy words for how much eyes and lips stand out compared with skin) as more competent than barefaced women, whether they had a quick glance or a longer inspection."

Genova Science Festival

2011-10-12T10:01:00.000-07:00

Next week I'll give a "Lectio Magistralis" (not sure exactly what this means, but probably I am not worthy ;-) at the Genova Science Festival.

Below are the title and abstract. Slightly imperfect Google translation.

Unificare le forze e le idee: La sorprendente semplicità della natura

Il mondo che ci circonda è straordinariamente complesso, abbondante, complicato. È affascinante scoprire come la complessità della natura possa essere spiegata in termini semplici. Questo grazie alle leggi fisiche fondamentali che forniscono una descrizione unificata dei fenomeni naturali. Per mezzo della fisica sveliamo così il cuore semplice ed elegante del mondo. Dopo aver discusso dell’unificazione in fisica delle forze fondamentali della natura, si presenta l’idea di "sintesi": algoritmi compatti che riescono a generare i più complessi fenomeni, proprio come la natura semplice riesce a creare la complessità che ci circonda. Nella discussione si aprono nuove prospettive che legano la descrizione della natura semplice a quella delle idee e del pensiero, umano e artificiale. Lo studio di questi algoritmi risulta infatti centrale non solo in fisica, ma anche nell’evoluzione, nella biologia e nelle ultime ricerche in intelligenza artificiale.

The venue for my talk (Palazzo Ducale Sala del Maggior Consiglio) appears to be the most beautiful room I have ever lectured in!

Margin Call

2011-10-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

I can't believe they shot this for only $3.5 million. A lot of star power for such a tiny budget. NYTimes review.

Limits

2011-10-12T08:15:00.000-07:00

In a Harvard Square cafe with a famous theoretical physicist. Small talk after discussing some research. I am in my mid twenties, my counterpart is an older professor.

What do you think happens to those child prodigies?

Weren't you a child prodigy?

No, the real ones. Kid geniuses who finish college at age 12. There's always one in the paper.

I don't think any eighteen year old in the world understands quantum mechanics as well as I do.

Let them eat cake

2011-10-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

Does this include secretaries? See Manhattan on $500k a year.

Nobel Prizes 2011

2011-10-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

I was a bit busy last week, with a visitor, posting a paper, etc. so I didn't get to comment on the Nobel prizes.

The dark energy prize is richly deserved (see slides from a colloquium on dark energy I've given a few times; includes above figure). These guys have discovered where most of the energy in the universe is, and may have determined the ultimate fate of the universe on cosmological scales. I note Saul Perlmutter was awarded 1/2 the prize and the other two guys each received 1/4. This may seem like petty credit splitting, but in this case it is appropriate as Perlmutter's group at LBNL have been working on supernova astronomy for a long time trying to get it to work. (Since when I was a grad student!) Perlmutter attributes the original idea to Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimentalist of the 20th century.

In finding that the universe is on a path to runaway expansion, you had to find type Ia supernovae, which can act as distance markers. How did you get involved with supernova searching?

I was at the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school. One of the heroes here at Berkeley is Luis Alvarez. The tradition that he started is looking for interesting science no matter where it is and then finding tools to do those things. For example, he invented one of the first steady cams.

One of his protégés was my professor, Richard Muller. There was a project to do a superautomated supernova search that Luis Alvarez had suggested to Rich. They had just done one of the first adaptive-optics experiments.

...

To what do you most attribute your scientific success?

I think the biggest thing is, first of all, being willing to learn things, being willing to pick up a new area, but also just being able to work with other people. Most of these jobs are too big for any one person. You end up trying to find a team of people who are as excited as you are and want to push the technique forward. I'm always struck by the fact that the image of the scientist is as a lone person wearing a lab jacket in the lab by themselves for hours, whereas my sense is that maybe the single most important thing for a scientist, aside from being able to think of good questions, is figuring out good people to work with and enjoying the process of inventing ideas together with other people.

You can add one more Nobel prize to the Berkeley lab collection:

I don't have too much to say about the quasicrystal prize, except that there are several curious aspects (this is mostly second hand stuff I picked up from colleagues): 1. the chemists gave a prize for a physics discovery, and seem to have botched the job: 2. they left out the theorist who was instrumental in convincing people that Shechtman's result was for real (Steinhardt had worked out the theory of quasicrystals out already, and even coined the name!) and 3. Shechtman's group at NIST (where he made the discovery) didn't believe the result and his boss kicked him out!

Hurray for the little guy

2011-10-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

I actually spent more time at Harvard than at Caltech, and the former paid me generously to be there while the latter charged me tuition. But I still root for the geeky underdog :-)

My Caltech graduating class was 186 kids. How many schools that size can compete with Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley or Cambridge in anything?

A reasonable university ranking metric should have components that are normalized to size. For example, the number of citations or publications or research dollars per professor (or per student) is more informative than the absolute number. Otherwise schools with 50 or 100 thousand students would have a misleading advantage over smaller schools. But once you try to adjust your metrics to take this into account it is very hard to keep Caltech from coming out as number one. You basically have to cook the books ;-)

TimesHigherEducation: ... In the eight years that Times Higher Education has published a global university ranking, one thing had always seemed unassailable: Harvard University's position as the world's number one. Not any more.

Harvard - the world's best-known university, boasting a brand some sources rate as more valuable than Pepsi, Nike or Sony - has this year been pushed off the top spot.

Most remarkably, the 375-year-old colossus of global higher education has been toppled by a much younger, much smaller upstart from the West Coast of the US. The world's number one for 2011-12 is the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech. Why? It is clear that the differences at the pinnacle of the World University Rankings are minuscule. In terms of the overall score for each institution, the gap last year between first-placed Harvard and second-placed Caltech was 0.1 point.

This year, Caltech pips Harvard with marginally better scores for "research - volume, income and reputation", research influence (measured by paper citations) and (most substantially) the income it attracts from industry. Harvard just beats Caltech for the quality of its teaching environment.

Don't take it from me, or some crazy ranking metric, just ask (Economics) Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith, who attended both institutions:

At Harvard they believe they are the best in the world; at Caltech they know they are the best in the world

... The first thing to which one has to adapt is the fact that no matter how high people might sample in the right tail of the distribution for "intelligence," ... that sample is still normally distributed in performing on the materials in the Caltech curriculum.

So long, Steve

2011-10-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” [The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

Fast evolution in Quebec

2011-10-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

These researchers find evidence that genes lowering the age at first reproduction (AFR) became more prevalent over 140 years in a small isolated population for which they had detailed ancestry records. See also this NYTimes article.

I haven't read the paper yet, so can't comment on the result. Environmental confounds might be tricky, but I suppose the result is basically that children of low AFR mothers tend to also have low AFR and that AFR dropped systematically in the population due to greater fitness (effective fertility) of low AFR women over the 140 years.

Those pesky allele frequencies, they are not constant in time ;-)

Evidence for evolution in response to natural selection in a contemporary human population (PNAS)

It is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection. In contrast, recent studies show that selection can be strong in contemporary populations. However, detecting a response to selection is particularly challenging; previous evidence from wild animals has been criticized for both applying anticonservative statistical tests and failing to consider random genetic drift. Here we study life-history variation in an insular preindustrial French-Canadian population and apply a recently proposed conservative approach to testing microevolutionary responses to selection. As reported for other such societies, natural selection favored an earlier age at first reproduction (AFR) among women. AFR was also highly heritable and genetically correlated to fitness, predicting a microevolutionary change toward earlier reproduction. In agreement with this prediction, AFR declined from about 26–22 y over a 140-y period. Crucially, we uncovered a substantial change in the breeding values for this trait, indicating that the change in AFR largely occurred at the genetic level. Moreover, the genetic trend was higher than expected under the effect of random genetic drift alone. Our results show that microevolution can be detectable over relatively few generations in humans and underscore the need for studies of human demography and reproductive ecology to consider the role of evolutionary processes. (Italics mine)

Hollowing out

2011-10-05T08:48:00.000-07:00

How the US lost much of its manufacturing capability, step by step. Each business decision along the way may have been rational for the individual company making it, but the cumulative effect has been a hollowing out of US technological capabilities.

Forbes: ... The U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the U.S., even if Amazon wanted to:

The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.

The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producting flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.

The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the U.S. supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.

The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.

The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.

The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

An exception is Apple [AAPL], which “has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users’ needs.” [Sure, but they meet with Taiwanese engineers who are the ones who know what is actually feasible.]

... So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.

... “already lost” to the USA:

“Fabless chips”; compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.

This is from a multi-part series. See further down this page for links to the first 10 articles.

See also this earlier post, on conversations with an in-law who is a senior executive at Foxconn (makers of the iPhone and iPad, among other things).

... My uncle is worried about prospects for the US -- he sees the technology gap between China and the US as almost closed and wonders how America can compete against Chinese workers making much lower wages. He didn't deny that the US is still more innovative, but noted that the gains from this innovation (i.e., jobs and commercial industries) are now captured by those with manufacturing capability. In other words, a key bit of innovation might make a few people (e.g., at a startup) rich, but down the line someone has to actually manufacture and ship products, which creates jobs and wealth at a much larger scale. He is certain that will be done in China. I tried to point out that this is counter to the conventional US mythology (Apple gets the big margins, Foxconn's profit is pennies per iThingy shipped), but he just said "It's a matter of time."

On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics

2011-10-04T19:55:00.000-07:00

New paper! This is a brief writeup of the talk I gave last year in Benasque, as well as a few other places. Slides are available at the link above.

On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics

http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0549

I give a brief introduction to many worlds or "no wavefunction collapse" quantum mechanics, suitable for non-specialists. I then discuss the origin of probability in such formulations, distinguishing between objective and subjective notions of probability.

Here's what I say in the conclusion.

Decoherence does not resolve the collapse question, contrary to what many physicists think. Rather, it illuminates the process of measurement and reveals that pure Schrodinger evolution (without collapse) can produce the quantum phenomena we observe. This of course raises the question: do we need collapse? If the conventional interpretation was always ill-defined (again, see Bell for an honest appraisal [1]; Everett referred to it as a "philosophical monstrosity''), why not remove the collapse or von Neumann projection postulates entirely from quantum mechanics?

The origin of probability is the real difficulty within many worlds interpretations. The problem is subtle and experts are divided as to whether it has been resolved satisfactorily. Because the wave function evolves entirely deterministically in many worlds, all probabilities are necessarily subjective and the interpretation does not require true randomness, thereby preserving Einstein's requirement that outcomes have causes.

[1] J.S. Bell's famous article Against Measurement.

Startup-ville, NYC

2011-10-03T19:29:00.000-07:00

Nice digs. I think the community aspect and seminars on topics like venture or employment law are really valuable. Probably not as good as Y-Combinator, but what do you expect for NYC? ;-)

China economic challenges

2011-10-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

Highlights of a special FT debate looking at the choices that lie ahead for the world’s second largest economy: video. [Related statistic: Chinese internet users now exceed 500 million, greater than the entire population of the EU.]

Forensic Asia's Gillem Tulloch believes that the Chinese property market is a bubble on a similar magnitude to the crisis in the US as a result of the huge stimulus package after the global financial crisis. He tells the FT why he thinks China could be on the verge of a property-led slump that would have an impact far beyond its own borders: video. [The only question is when this bubble will pop and whether it will be an orderly decline.]

Market solution for PhD advising

2011-09-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

I knew the author of this article when she was an assistant professor at UO. Since then, she moved to UIUC (Illinois), received tenure, became a department head, left academia and moved back to Eugene. Her web site.

Karen, stop by and see us some time! :-)

Chronicle of Higher Education:

Dear faculty members:

I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you're not doing your job.

Lest you think that by advising, I mean editing research papers and dissertations, let me disabuse you. I offer those services, but rarely am I asked for them.

A former tenured professor at a major research university, I am now running an academic-career consulting business. That's right: I am doing graduate advising for pay. I am teaching your Ph.D. students to do things like plan a publishing trajectory, tailor their dissertations for grant agencies, strategize recommendation letters, evaluate a journal's status, judge the relative merits of postdoctoral options, interpret a rejection, follow up on an acceptance, and—above all—get jobs. And business is so good I'm booked ahead for months. ...

See Advice to a new graduate student.

Soros: nationalize European banks

2011-09-30T08:16:00.000-07:00

Soros outlines his proposal for solving the eurozone crisis. It seems to me that the best informed people are the most alarmed by the current situation. I notice Pimco just went into "risk-off" mode.

Financial Times: Financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression. The authorities, particularly in Europe, have lost control of the situation. They need to regain control and they need to do so now.

Three bold steps are needed. First, the governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common Treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the main banks must be put under European Central Bank direction in return for a temporary guarantee and permanent recapitalisation. The ECB would direct banks to maintain credit lines and outstanding loans, while closely monitoring risks taken for their own accounts. Third, the ECB would enable countries such as Italy and Spain to temporarily refinance themselves within limits at a very low cost. These steps would calm markets and give Europe time to develop a growth strategy, without which the debt problem cannot be solved.

[ More privatizing gains and socializing losses? ]

... This course of action does not require leveraging or increasing the size of the EFSF but it is more radical because it puts the banks under European control. That is liable to arouse the opposition of both the banks and the national authorities. Only public pressure can make it happen.

I'm not sure what the "growth strategy" would be. Despite what Keynes wrote, it's not easy for governments to simply order up (healthy, real) growth, even with checkbook in hand. I'm with Hayek that this kind of growth is something you might pay for dearly in the long run. In addition, governments are running out of ammunition.

*** I realize that what Soros proposes isn't exactly nationalization of at-risk banks. But ultimately the ECB and European taxpayers will assume responsibility for their prior investment decisions.

The next lost decade?

2011-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

Satyajit Das on what's ahead in the eurozone: video

Possible chain of events: More pain ahead for Greece, culminating in a big write down for its creditors. ECB solvency challenges. Sovereign debt crises for Italy and Spain. Global recession followed by debt deflation. A lost decade worse than what Japan experienced in the 1990s.

Larry Summers interview with Martin Wolf: video

Amazon Silk

2011-09-28T08:28:00.001-07:00

I wonder what Apple's response will be to this. Perhaps we'll see a "split-browser" update of (mobile) Safari soon. On the desktop I switched over to Chrome 1-2 years ago because it feels faster and it runs Google apps flawlessly. If Silk tries to do things too aggressively it might break a few applications or web pages (very tough to QA stuff like that). But probably there are speedups (e.g., smart pre-caching of popular content) that can be achieved without risk of breaking functionality and which can be exploited within a more conservative approach. Users will probably be forgiving because it's running on a $199 device with a 7" screen (Amazon Fire). The Silk team blog is here.

Papa's life

2011-09-25T09:17:00.000-07:00

A fine essay on Hemingway by James Salter, a review of the new book by Paul Hendrickson.

NY Review of Books: ... From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he took with a friend when he was sixteen years old, he wrote of trout fishing, “Great fun fighting them in the dark in the deep swift river.” His style was later said to have been influenced by Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, journalism, and the forced economy of transatlantic cables, but he had his own poetic gift and also the intense desire to give to the reader the full and true feeling of what happened, to make the reader feel it had happened to him. He pared things down. He left out all that could be readily understood or taken for granted and the rest he delivered with savage exactness. There is a nervy tension in his writing. The words seem to stand almost in defiance of one another. The powerful early stories that were made of simple declaratives seemed somehow to break through into a new language, a genuine American language that had so far been undiscovered, and with it was a distinct view of the world.

... the sea, Key West, Cuba, all the places, the life he had and gloried in. His commanding personality comes to life again in these pages, his great charm and warmth as well as his egotism and aggression.

“Forgive him anything,” as George Seldes’s wife said in the early days, “he writes like an angel.”

Luttwak interview

2011-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from an interview with Edward Luttwak.

... Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities and nothing else.

I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to fit in. I have to review it for the TLS, but I’ve been delaying it by weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter corruption.

... Personally, from an emotional point of view, myself, as me, I prefer the Z.O.G. explanation above all others. I love the idea that the Zionists have sufficient power to actually occupy America, and through America to basically run the world. I love the idea of being a member of a secretive and powerful cabal. If you put my name Luttwak together with Perle and Wolfowitz and you search the Internet, you will get this little list of people who run the American government and the world, and I’m on it. I love that.

Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics? It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.

[Putin] ... Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.

Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.

FTL neutrinos and stat arb

2011-09-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

xkcd

Australian Aborigine genome

2011-09-22T16:51:00.000-07:00

I was wondering when they would get around to this. Australian Aborigines are one of the most unique human populations. Many people have been curious about their genetics and deep history.

Although I was just recently at BGI (where this sequencing was done), no one told me anything about a hair sample!

See also Razib's discussion.

Science: We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. We also find evidence of gene flow between populations of the two dispersal waves prior to the divergence of Native Americans from modern Asian ancestors. Our findings support the hypothesis that present-day Aboriginal Australians descend from the earliest humans to occupy Australia, likely representing one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa.

Confidence Men

2011-09-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

A good interview with Ron Suskind about his new book Confidence Men. I believe what Suskind wrote about the Bush administration has been largely vindicated. Suskind comes across as very careful with his sourcing. (So does Joe McInnis in this interview about his Palin bio The Rogue.)

Careful scrutiny suggests it's mostly sociopaths at the top ;-)

Fresh Air: ... Suskind says Summers' style of leadership at the White House was to "control the show" and "lead by fiat."

"A young economist ... [once told me that Larry once said] 'Here's the way it works. ... I can win either side of the argument. That's my genius. That's what I do. And then I win both sides and I think about which side I won more fairly when deciding which is right. Sometimes I decide otherwise,' " says Suskind. "The young economist who recounts the story says, 'Jeez, Larry, that gives you an awful lot of power to shape everything,' and Larry sort of says, 'Yeah, that's the point.' And that's kind of how Larry sees it — the economic policy will be what Larry decides in consultation with a president who has very, very little in the way of training in economic theory or practice." In his book, Suskind quotes Summers as saying, on record, that "Clinton would never have made these mistakes" that the Obama administration made. Summers has denied making those comments. He told The Washington Post last week that "the hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion and words taken out of context. I can't speak to what others have told Mr. Suskind but I have always believed that the president has always led this country with determined, steady and practical leadership."

... Suskind tells Terry Gross that he talked to Summers as the book was going to press about his statements in the book, including the one where he said "Clinton would never have made these mistakes."

"At first Larry blurted out, 'I deny it,' and then I said, 'Look, Larry, lots of people heard you talk about this and say this. This is not something you uttered once to one person. Lots of people remember where they were when they heard it.' ... Then after a few minutes, he came back with his response. He said, 'Look, we had five times as many problems, we didn't have five times as many people. It was an overwhelming time, very difficult for everyone involved.' He lays it on the door of circumstances. ... The Washington walk back has a long history, as anyone who works in this town knows."

Passing the torch

2011-09-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

From Fermi Remembered. The insightful biographical sketch at the beginning of the book, by Emelio Segre, includes details of Fermi's early (self) education and entry into Scuola Normale Superiore.

Murray Gell-Mann: When Fermi lay dying in Billings Hospital, I realized how much I cared for this brilliant, funny, difficult man. I was on leave in the East, and I invited Frank (C.N.) Yang to come with me to Chicago to see him. When we got to the bedside, Enrico kept telling us not to be downcast. "It is not so bad," he said. He told of a Catholic priest who had visited him and whom he had had to comfort. And Frank reminded me a few years ago of what Enrico said when we left, never to see him again. "Now, it is up to you."

Talpiot and Israeli psychometrics

2011-09-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

The other day I was discussing the Israeli Talpiot program with another Caltecher. I thought it would be great if we had a similar program in the US. He said it sounded like Ender's Game :-)

If anyone out there is an expert on the Israeli Psychometric Entrance Test (their SAT-equivalent), please contact me. We're trying to determine the +3 SD cutoff (relative to the US population) for our GWAS.

See earlier post on Talpiot and Israeli startups.

USAToday: ... The "Talpiot" program is perhaps the best reflection of the army's technological drive.

The unit, one of the most selective in the military, was formed in the wake of the 1973 war, when Israel was caught off guard and lost some 2,500 men.

"One of the lessons was that we need a technological edge over our enemies and we need to develop this edge from within," said Talpiot's commander, Maj. Amir Schlachet.

In Israel, where military service is mandatory, more than 5,000 young people apply to Talpiot each year, hoping to be among the 50 or so accepted. They must pass a grueling battery of tests in math, physics, group dynamics, leadership skills and intelligence.

The reward: a nine-year commitment, beginning with a 3½-year dual bachelor's degree program in mathematics and physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Vacations are spent jumping out of airplanes and participating in other military exercises. Along the way, roughly one out of five soldiers leave the program, Schlachet said.

Those who survive go on to careers as officers in some of the military's most prestigious operations, mostly in research and development projects, Schlachet said. From there, the 500-odd Talpiot grads have tended to find their way to the upper echelons of business and academia, he said.

"You learn self-confidence, not to be afraid of anything. No subject is too complex to go after, and no answer should be taken for granted," said Talpiot grad Gilad Almogy, 38, Applied Materials' top executive in Israel.

The Nasdaq-traded biotech company Compugen was formed by three of Almogy's Talpiot comrades. A fourth, Mor Amitai, now runs the company.

Amitai says some of the most complicated work he ever did was during his time in Talpiot. "The experience of sometimes succeeding, almost always as part of a team, involving something that really seemed impossible, I think this is something we took with us," he said.

True grit

2011-09-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

The next project with my colleague Jim Schombert is to see whether student personality inventories increase our ability to predict college GPA. In previous work we found a .4 or so correlation between SAT score and upper division in-major GPA. (Other studies, which focus on freshman GPA, typically find lower correlations but this is partly because academically stronger freshmen usually take harder courses. At the upper division level, majors typically have to take certain core courses, so there is more uniformity.) The correlation is somewhat higher (.5 to .6) if we use a z score derived from high school GPA and SAT. We think GPA is a proxy for conscientiousness, or what is referred to below as grit. But there is too much grade inflation in high school these days, and GPA depends both on work ethic and cognitive ability. So we'd like to see how well personality variables work. Optimistically, I think we can do better than correlations of .6, which is pretty impressive for social science.

NYTimes: ... People who accomplished great things, she noticed, often combined a passion for a single mission with an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission, whatever the obstacles and however long it might take. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word “grit.”

She developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, in that it requires you to rate yourself on just 12 questions, from “I finish whatever I begin” to “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” It takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report — and yet when Duckworth took it out into the field, she found it was remarkably predictive of success. At Penn, high grit ratings allowed students with relatively low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high G.P.A.’s. Duckworth and her collaborators gave their grit test to more than 1,200 freshman cadets as they entered West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the Whole Candidate Score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness and a Leadership Potential Score. But at the end of Beast Barracks, the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s 12-item grit questionnaire.

[Of course, the grit score can't be used for admissions -- too easy to game, unlike an IQ test! Instead we use proxies for grit, like extracurriculars.]

... The first question Duckworth addressed, again, was the relative importance of I.Q. and self-control. She and her team of researchers gave middle-school students at Riverdale and KIPP a variety of psychological and I.Q. tests. They found that at both schools, I.Q. was the better predictor of scores on statewide achievement tests, but measures of self-control were more reliable indicators of report-card grades.

Duckworth’s research convinced Levin and Randolph that they should try to foster self-control and grit in their students. Yet those didn’t seem like the only character strengths that mattered. ... After a few small adjustments (Levin and Randolph opted to drop love in favor of curiosity), they settled on a final list: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity.

Here's a figure from our paper Data Mining the University, which shows how SAT predicts GPA. The stars are over- and under-achievers (blue = male, red = female). Do the people in the upper left (over-achievers) have grit?

MMA and paleo

2011-09-13T22:18:00.000-07:00

"From cave to cage: Mixed martial arts in ancestral health" by Tucker Max from Ancestry on Vimeo.

Via Seth Roberts. Beyond the technical coolness of MMA, I just like the idea that if you and I mix it up, you'll end up unconscious or with a broken limb.

US oligarchy net worth

2011-09-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Is this true? Let's say the top 400 families average a few billion each. Then the average net worth for the bottom 50 million families would have to be about $20-30k. Seems possible.

Guardian: ... In fact, so staggeringly unbalanced has America become that the richest 400 American families have the same net worth as the bottom 50% of the nation.

If this outrages or saddens you, I recommend Who rules America?

If you believe this is a just, pareto optimal outcome, I suggest graduate school in economics, perhaps in Chicago ;-)

Better beta?

2011-09-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

It's rough at the top! But, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

I guess I'm an alpha trying to adapt to living beta. Nothing like a steep drop in testosterone level to help with this ...

WSJ: One evening a week, a group of CEOs meets in a Manhattan psychiatrist's office and engages in an ancient ritual. Ostensibly, it is a support group.

Inevitably, it becomes a battle for dominance."Whenever you put alpha males together, the most aggressive will overpower the others," says T. Byram Karasu, the veteran psychiatrist who has run the sessions for the past 23 years. The fighting is subtle, but it's vicious. "Even giving advice is geared toward lowering the others' self-esteem. Those at the lower end of the group come away doubting themselves, and their testosterone falls. They tell me they can't have sex for three or four days afterward."

Alpha males get the girls, but beta males have fewer stress-related health problems, at least among baboons, according to a recent Princeton study. As Melinda Beck explains on Lunch Break, that appears to have health consequences for humans, too.

It isn't easy being an alpha male. Getting to the top and staying there takes a physical toll.

The latest evidence comes from wild baboons in Kenya's Amboseli basin. Researchers from Princeton and Duke universities studied 125 males in five groups over nine years and found that while the alpha males got the best food and the most mates, they experienced far more stress than the beta males just beneath them in the hierarchy, based on the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in fecal samples.

The beta males had almost as many mates and got just as much grooming from others, but they didn't have to spend as much time fighting or following females around to keep other males away.

"Being an alpha is exhausting. I'd rather be a beta," says Laurence Gesquiere, lead author of the study that appeared in the journal Science in July.

In the human savannah, where smarts matter more than brute strength, alphas run companies, amass fortunes and dominate any meeting they're in. They are ambitious, assertive, confident and competitive. "You can smell it in about 30 seconds," says Dr. Karasu, who is psychiatrist-in-chief of Montefiore Medical Center in New York.

... Beta males, by contrast, are nice guys, peacemakers and team players. They make good husbands, fathers and friends. Some experts say they tend to be happier than alphas, since they aren't driven by the need to be on top. Betas can come in many forms—from competent wingmen to extreme introverts who are so determined to avoid conflict they suffer anxiety of their own.

Many observational studies of people and primates have shown that, in general, it's more stressful at the bottom of the social hierarchy than the top. Two long-running studies of British civil-service workers found that people in the lowest ranks had many more health problems and were three times as likely to die as the highest-grade administrators in a 10-year period—even though they all had access to health-care services.

To date, there have been few studies assessing whether human alphas or betas are healthier. ...

Alpha quiz:

Masters of the Universe

In the work world, alpha males are ambitious, assertive, confident and competitive. Here's a quiz that helps define who's an alpha male:

Alpha Strengths

1. No matter what, I don't give up until I reach my end goal.
2. I always say exactly what I think.
3. I have no problem challenging people.
4. I make the decision I believe is correct, even when I know other people don't agree.
5. I seldom have any doubts about my ability to deliver.

Alpha Risks

1. I believe that my value is defined by the results I achieve.
2. I don't care if my actions hurt people's feelings, if that's what's required to produce results.
3. When people disagree with me, I often treat it as a challenge or an affront.
4. If I have a good idea and I'm asked to hold off and listen to inferior ideas, I can quickly become visibly annoyed.
5. People say I become curt, brusque, or frustrated when I have to repeat myself.

Scoring:

If all or nearly all of your responses to statements 1 to 5 were "yes," you are probably an alpha with many of the strengths that make alphas such dynamic and influential leaders.

Fatherhood suppresses testosterone

2011-09-12T14:19:00.000-07:00

No wonder I feel so wimpy :-(

NYTimes: ... Testosterone was measured when the men were 21 and single, and again nearly five years later. Although testosterone naturally decreases with age, men who became fathers showed much greater declines, more than double the childless men.

And men who spent more than three hours a day caring for children — playing, feeding, bathing, toileting, reading or dressing them — had the lowest testosterone.

Below is the abstract from the original paper (PNAS).

In species in which males care for young, testosterone (T) is often high during mating periods but then declines to allow for caregiving of resulting offspring. This model may apply to human males, but past human studies of T and fatherhood have been cross-sectional, making it unclear whether fatherhood suppresses T or if men with lower T are more likely to become fathers. Here, we use a large representative study in the Philippines (n = 624) to show that among single nonfathers at baseline (2005) (21.5 ± 0.3 y), men with high waking T were more likely to become partnered fathers by the time of follow-up 4.5 y later (P < 0.05). Men who became partnered fathers then experienced large declines in waking (median: −26%) and evening (median: −34%) T, which were significantly greater than declines in single nonfathers (P < 0.001). Consistent with the hypothesis that child interaction suppresses T, fathers reporting 3 h or more of daily childcare had lower T at follow-up compared with fathers not involved in care (P < 0.05). Using longitudinal data, these findings show that T and reproductive strategy have bidirectional relationships in human males, with high T predicting subsequent mating success but then declining rapidly after men become fathers. Our findings suggest that T mediates tradeoffs between mating and parenting in humans, as seen in other species in which fathers care for young. They also highlight one likely explanation for previously observed health disparities between partnered fathers and single men.

Labor and Capital in 21st century America

2011-09-10T20:58:00.000-07:00

Bill Gross of PIMCO writes:

During this country’s recent economic “recovery,” real corporate profits increased by four times the amount of working wages in dollar terms, and, as the chart below shows, are 50% higher than at the turn of the century while wages remain relatively unchanged, something that has not occurred since this country’s nuptials were concluded over three centuries ago. Is it any wonder that preliminary battlefield skirmishes in Wisconsin and Ohio between labor and capital promise to spread across every state of this land? (Not Texas!) Is it any wonder that Republican orthodoxies favoring tax cuts for the rich and Democratic orthodoxies promoting entitlements for the poor threaten to hamstring any constructive efforts to reduce unemployment over the foreseeable future?

[See comments, where it is suggested Gross might be wrong on the facts.]

In transit: HK

2011-09-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

Sunrise over China.

Red Carpet Club, HK airport.

I've never liked HK, but the infrastructure here is first rate.

BGI photos

2011-09-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

I've now lost track of how many times I've been here.

$10 million in sequencing machines in this room ($500k Illumina HiSeqs). But I think they're just for training. There are a hundred more at the HK lab.

An old poster. Monitor Group report whose cover is depicted.

Amusing signage (if you can read Chinese). Note the Gattaca background.

Shooting interviews for the documentary on our research project.

The dreaded baijiu. This brand is called "Red Star"!

Advice to a new graduate student

2011-09-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

A friend who is starting graduate school asked for some advice.

1. There is often a tradeoff between the advisor from whom you will learn the most vs the one who will help your career the most. Letters of recommendation are the most important factor in obtaining a postdoc/faculty job, and some professors are 10x as influential as others. However, the influential prof might be a jerk and not good at training students. The kind mentor with deep knowledge or the approachable junior faculty member might not be a mover and shaker.

2. Most grad students fail to grasp the big picture in their field and get too caught up in their narrowly defined dissertation project.

3. Benchmark yourself against senior scholars at a similar stage in their (earlier) careers. What should you have accomplished / mastered as a grad student or postdoc in order to keep pace with your benchmark?

4. Take the opportunity to interact with visitors and speakers. Don't assume that because you are a student they'll be uninterested in intellectual exchange with you. Even established scholars are pleased to be asked interesting questions by intelligent grad students. If you get to the stage where the local professors think you are really good, i.e., they sort of think of you as a peer intellect or colleague, you might get invited along to dinner with the speaker!

5. Understand the trends and bandwagons in your field. Most people cannot survive on the job market without chasing trends at least a little bit. But always save some brainpower for thinking about the big questions that most interest you.

6. Work your ass off. If you outwork the other guy by 10%, the compound effect over time could accumulate into a qualitative difference in capability or depth of knowledge.

7. Don't be afraid to seek out professors with questions. Occasionally you will get a gem of an explanation. Most things, even the most conceptually challenging, can be explained in a very clear and concise way after enough thought. A real expert in the field will have accumulated many such explanations, which are priceless.

Please feel free to contribute your own advice!

Dune

2011-09-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

Dune is my favorite science fiction novel. But I never finished any of the sequels, which I found tedious. I more or less stopped reading science fiction when I was a kid, so perhaps my opinion about the sequels is unreliable.

The appendix below hints at a larger framework (see last sentence) that is not revealed in the first book. (Nor in the Wikipedia entries on Dune, as far as I can tell.) What is this larger plan, in which the Bene Gesserit are only pawns? Is it revealed in later books or in interviews with Frank Herbert?

Appendix III: Report on Bene Gesserit Motives and Purposes

Here follows an excerpt from the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis Affair. The candor of this report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary. Because the Bene Gesserit operated for centuries behind the blind of a semimystic school while carrying on their selective breeding program among humans, we tend to award them with more status than they appear to deserve. Analysis of their "trial of fact" on the Arrakis Affair betrays the school's profound ignorance of its own role.

It may be argued that the Bene Gesserit could examine only such facts as were available to them and had no direct access to the person of the Prophet Muad'Dib. But the school had surmounted greater obstacles and its error here goes deeper. The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts carefully:

Muad'Dib, born Paul Atreides, was the son of the Duke Leto, a man whose bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. The Prophet's mother, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and carried gene-markers whose supreme importance to the breeding program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project.

The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union. Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son. This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme. But there were other far more important indications that they virtually ignored:

1. As a youth, Paul Atreides showed ability to predict the future. He was known to have had prescient visions that were accurate, penetrating, and defied four-dimensional explanation.

2. The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Bene Gesserit Proctor who tested Paul's humanity when he was fifteen, deposes that he surmounted more agony in the test than any other human of record. Yet she failed to make special note of this in her report!

3. When Family Atreides moved to the planet Arrakis, the Fremen population there hailed the young Paul as a prophet, "the voice from the outer world." The Bene Gesserit were well aware that the rigors of such a planet as Arrakis with its totality of desert landscape, its absolute lack of open water, its emphasis on the most primitive necessities for survival, inevitably produces a high proportion of sensitives. Yet this Fremen reaction and the obvious element of the Arrakeen diet high in spice were glossed over by Bene Gesserit observers.

4. When the Harkonnens and the soldier-fanatics of the Padishah Emperor reoccupied Arrakis, killing Paul's father and most of the Atreides troops, Paul and his mother disappeared. But almost immediately there were reports of a new religious leader among the Fremen, a man called Muad'Dib, who again was hailed as "the voice from the outer world." The reports stated clearly that he was accompanied by a new Reverend Mother of the Sayyadina Rite "who is the woman who bore him." Records available to the Bene Gesserit stated in plain terms that the Fremen legends of the Prophet contained these words: "He shall be born of a Bene Gesserit witch."

(It may be argued here that the Bene Gesserit sent their Missionaria Protectiva onto Arrakis centuries earlier to implant something like this legend as safeguard should any members of the school be trapped there and require sanctuary, and that this legend of "the voice from the outer world" was properly to be ignored because it appeared to be the standard Bene Gesserit ruse. But this would be true only if you granted that the Bene Gesserit were correct in ignoring the other clues about Paul-Muad'Dib.)

5. When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild made overtures to the Bene Gesserit. The Guild hinted that its navigators, who use the spice drug of Arrakis to produce the limited prescience necessary for guiding spaceships through the void, were "bothered about the future" or saw "problems on the horizon." This could only mean they saw a nexus, a meeting place of countless delicate decisions, beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order dimensions!

(A few of the Bene Gesserit had long been aware that the Guild could not interfere directly with the vital spice source because Guild navigators already were dealing in their own inept way with higher order dimensions, at least to the point where they recognized that the slightest misstep they made on Arrakis could be catastrophic. It was a known fact that Guild navigators could predict no way to take control of the spice without producing just such a nexus. The obvious conclusion was that someone of higher order powers was taking control of the spice source, yet the Bene Gesserit missed this point entirely!)

In the face of these facts, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that the inefficient Bene Gesserit behavior in this affair was a product of an even higher plan of which they were completely unaware!

Keynes v Hayek

2011-09-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the debate you get to hear a bunch of Brits at the LSE shouting "Yo Keynes!" and "Yo Hayek!" in support of their respective sides. No one seems capable of convincing the other side of anything, but the discussion is entertaining.

Keynes v Hayek

Speaker(s): Professor George Selgin, Professor Lord Skidelsky, Duncan Weldon, Dr Jamie Whyte

Recorded on 26 July 2011.

How do we get out of the financial mess we're in? Two of the great economic thinkers of the 20th century had sharply contrasting views: John Maynard Keynes believed that governments could create sustainable employment and growth. His contemporary and rival Friedrich Hayek believed that investments have to be based on real savings rather than fiscal stimulus or artificially low interest rates.

See also round 2 of the Keynes Hayek rap video:

Shenzhen key lab

2011-09-02T23:43:00.000-07:00

Shenzhen municipality key laboratory -- cognitive genomics research.

Supposedly this means I'll get a special visa and won't have to keep applying for a new one every 12 months.

Note this distinction doesn't mean our group is part of the Chinese government, as some paranoids have claimed. BGI is a private institution with both for-profit and non-profit arms.

Epistasis vs additivity

2011-08-31T22:57:00.000-07:00

Continuing the discussion from my previous post: strong interactions at the level of individual genes do not preclude a linear (additive) analysis of population variation and natural selection.

On epistasis: why it is unimportant in polygenic directional selection

[Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2010) 365, 1241–1244 doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0275]

James F. Crow*
Genetics Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA

There is a difference in viewpoint of developmental and evo-devo geneticists versus breeders and students of quantitative evolution. The former are interested in understanding the developmental process; the emphasis is on identifying genes and studying their action and interaction. Typically, the genes have individually large effects and usually show substantial dominance and epistasis. The latter group are interested in quantitative phenotypes rather than individual genes. Quantitative traits are typically determined by many genes, usually with little dominance or epistasis. Furthermore, epistatic variance has minimum effect, since the selected population soon arrives at a state in which the rate of change is given by the additive variance or covariance. Thus, the breeder’s custom of ignoring epistasis usually gives a more accurate prediction than if epistatic variance were included in the formulae.

Why did Crow have to write this 2010 paper? Don't evo-devo folks understand population genetics? Why do they find the dominance of additive heritability to be so counter-intuitive? Which of the two groups of scientists has a better understanding of how evolution works? Evo-devo folks seem to be from the traditional "revel in complexity" branch of biology: perfectly happy to find that living creatures are too complicated to be modeled by equations. (But are they?)

Some excerpts from the paper:

... Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on epistasis (e.g. Wolf et al. 2000; Carlborg & Haley 2004). Students of development and evo-devo, as well as some human geneticists, have paid particular interest to interactions. For those in these fields, epistasis is an interesting phenomenon on its own and studying it gives deeper insights into developmental and evolutionary processes. Ultimately one wants to know which individual genes are involved, and if one is studying the effects of such genes, it is natural to con- sider the ways in which they interact. Historically, among many other uses, epistasis has provided a means for identifying steps in biochemical and developmental sequences. More generally, including epistasis is part of the description of gene effects. So epistasis, despite methodological challenges, is usually welcomed as providing further insights. Students of development or evo-devo typically study genes of major effect. Of course, genes with major effects are more easily discovered, so they may be providing a biased sample. But we can say that at least some of the genes involved have large effects. And such genes typically show considerable dominance and epistasis.

In contrast, animal and plant breeders have traditionally regarded epistasis as a nuisance, akin to noise in impeding or obscuring the progress of selection. It may seem surprising that the traditional practice of ignoring epistasis has not led to errors in prediction equations. Why? It is this seeming paradox that I wish to discuss.

Continuously distributed quantitative traits typically depend on a large number of factors, each making a small contribution to the quantitative measurement. In general, the smaller the effects, the more nearly additive they are. Experimental evidence for this is abundant. This is expected for reasons analogous to those for which taking only the first term of a Taylor series provides a good estimate. ...

The most extensive selection experiment, at least the one that has continued for the longest time, is the selection for oil and protein content in maize (Dudley 2007). These experiments began near the end of the nineteenth century and still continue; there are now more than 100 generations of selection. Remarkably, selection for high oil content and similarly, but less strikingly, selection for high protein, continue to make progress. There seems to be no diminishing of selectable variance in the population. The effect of selection is enormous: the difference in oil content between the high and low selected strains is some 32 times the original standard deviation.

... Students of development, evo-devo and human genetics often place great emphasis on epistasis. Usually they are identifying individual genes, and naturally the interactions among these are of the very essence of understanding. The individual gene effects are usually large enough for considerable epistasis to be expected.

Quantitative genetics has a contrasting view. The foregoing analysis shows that, under typical conditions, the rate of change under selection is given by the additive genetic variance or covariance. Any attempt to include epistatic terms in prediction formulae is likely to do more harm than good. Animal and plant breeders who ignored epistasis, for whatever reasons, good or bad, were nevertheless on the right track. And prediction formulae based on simple heritability measurements are appropriate.

The power of using microscopic knowledge (genes) to develop macroscopic theory (phenotypes), whereby phenotypic measurements are used to develop prediction formulae, is beautifully illustrated by quantitative genetics theory.

Can we understand evolution without mathematics? Two more useful references:

Statistical Mechanics and the Evolution of Polygenic Quantitative Traits

The Evolution of Multilocus Systems Under Weak Selection

Note I am at BGI right now so there may be some latency in communication.