> The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they're completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays.
One, even monks worried about status (though perhaps in different terms). Two, I think academics are generally perfectly self-aware about their relationship with status, and I don't think they are significantly different from other professions. I don't think it usually hinges on parking spaces though.
I think academics are aware that the problem just circles around in a different form. You can't escape the cycle of requiring any form of 'validation' or 'approval' from peers, and you have to rely on some 'in-system' validation mechanic that ultimately comes down to trust.
For an academic, you have to trust that both the individual producing the work and the individuals reviewing the work aren't getting sucked in by the hype or their own personal biases/needs/ego. As an academic, one has to trust and assume one's own work reflects one's own understanding to the highest possible caliber, and that once that work is released, that it will be examined rigorously to the same caliber professionally, academically.
But it's still a question of "having to trust in things you can't test for without changing the functioning of the approval/validation mechanic". Whether that's getting lost in the details of your own work (having so much knowledge it feels like you have none), or getting lost in the actual system itself - is the system designed so that bad actors are caught and weeded out - and honestly, it's my opinion that one singular mind can not manage all of this. But I think for many academics, the system is designed where, if one singular mind appears to mismanage any of this, they are labeled a bad actor.
So self awareness is more, something that just goes unrecognized and unnoticed, because it's considered a weakness to show it. The same thing happens in business, same behavior functionally. The way it presents itself is different because, there's a different yardstick. Money, quantifiable, measurable. But to the people actually moving large quantities of money around, it has as much potential for greatness or disaster as an enlightened intellect.
Have you dealt with academics a lot, in their home University contexts?
(I never had to directly, but I've spoken enough with people who have. Nothing about that writing strikes me as strange, or even particularly controversial.)
One should not underestimate the importance of parking spaces to an academic at a suburban school.
When an academic loses free or convenient parking, they are suddenly hit with either financial costs or a losses of time. The howling can be tremendous, and the memory of an academic can be very long.
Academics tend to operate in a resource-constrained environment, and on timescales of a few years, can be effectively zero-sum. If a resource is taken away, it may never return, and no compensation may be offered.
TL;DR: Hold wages constant if necessary, but don't go after the parking.
Most suburban campuses could have plenty of parking, but they avoid building enough so that supply is constrained, so that they can reward professors by handing out designated parking spaces.
The number of different levels of parking preference at Stanford boggles the mind.
As my father rose from lowly lecturer to top professor, at the University of Queensland his parking privileges slowly got worse (though it never got very bad). This in spite of the fact that a lot more parking was built.
So it seems that parking was redistributed away from academic staff during that period.
This may be true, but it's not clearly tied to status.
Of course, there are parking things which are tied to status, but these generally are only at higher administrative level (Dean &c.) - but then it's a special parking space which is a visible marker of status perhaps but clearly not the most important thing about the position (even status-wise).
My university doesn't have any free parking; if we want parking we have to pay a fee, which is based on how 'good' the spaces are. And (unless you're a Dean or whatever) you don't get a specific space but rather the right to park within certain designated areas. A significant number of faculty (myself included as well as my chair) choose to ride the bus or the train (which we do get free passes for, as do the students).
> Academics tend to operate in a resource-constrained environment, and on timescales of a few years, can be effectively zero-sum. If a resource is taken away, it may never return, and no compensation may be offered.
This is certainly (and sadly) true.
> TL;DR: Hold wages constant if necessary, but don't go after the parking.
No, I'd rather you properly increase my salary. Thank you.
I was a little lost at the first paragraph (we do have a name for the strategy behind the "no one ever got fired for buying an IBM" pitch[1]).
The next point is just weird for someone who knows anything about academic funding: maybe he's right if you limit "academics" to tenured professors who don't care about funding or the future of their post-docs and grad students, but for the rest of us status is an important part of the grant process. It's not as simple as "we like her, let's fund her grant" but grants are reviewed by your peers, so "status" is how we get payed.
There's a lot interesting in here, but a few real howlers. In particular:
> Homo economicus, not only has it never existed, my contention is that if homo economicus evolved for some peculiar reason, it would die out very, very quickly or we would club it to death with sticks. It's not in our evolutionary interest to be rational optimizers, by the way. Any species that's rational also becomes highly predictable, and anybody who's highly predictable is rapidly dead because you can anticipate his behavior and game it. Sometimes being unpredictable is the best approach.
There is no reason that rational behavior necessitates predicatability. The author mentions game theory but based on this paragraph you'd imagine he'd never studied it. Has he never heard of a mixed strategy?
> In the commercial world it's not in the interests of consumers to be rational. If you imagine a world of rational consumers where they all bought cars based on some formula, which was fuel economy multiplied by acceleration divided by depreciation or whatever it may be, what they would end up with would be really, really terrible cars. Car manufacturers would immediately game their predictable and easily understanding preferences and produce cars, which met all the metrics laid down for a desirable car, but the cars would be ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly, and no pleasure to own.
Apparently "rational" to this author means "taking one's actual preferences, and then throwing them out and replacing them by an easier-to-specify set of preferences that aren't your real preferences". Either the formula is their real preferences or it is not. If it is indeed their real preferences, then there is no problem; to say that this is their real preferences means they are truly indifferent to the fact that the cars are "ugly, uncomfortable, and generally ghastly", and so the conclusion that they would be "no pleasure to own" would be incorrect. If it's not, then there's your problem right there -- the problem isn't that they attempted to be "rational", it's that they attempted to make explicit their own preferences and got it wrong. You can't "game" someone's real preferences! Now it's true that any attempt to explicitly write down your real preferences is almost certainly going to go wrong, and it's probably a bad idea to attempt it, but the problem here isn't "rationality", it's making the mistake of deciding to act according to preferences you've written down rather than by your real preferences.
More generally: If you find yourself saying "it is not in your interest to be rational", something has gone wrong.
You absolutely can in some domains. Taste buds for instance have been exploited pretty heavily by the snack industry.
We can argue back and forth about what we really mean when we say "true preferences" but I think most readers would admit that mostly they don't want to eat an entire bag of Doritos in a single sitting.
A large part of the issue here is that behavioral economics has no idea what "actual preferences" are, so it defines them tautologically as "that which can have its expectation taken and be mapped to the real number line." Without constraints on the notion of preferences, you can always take any behavior and map it back to a class of scalar functions over outcomes for which it was perfect behavior.
I mean, assuming the behavior satisfies appropriate coherence conditions... (which actual human behavior doesn't as Misdicorl points out, but that's another matter).
No, any behavior can be mapped to "I prefer world-histories where I do A at time 1, B at time 2, C at time 3, ...". Your coherence conditions are the constraints on the notion of preferences without which trivial-behaviorist preferences can be constructed.
Edit: but yes, human behavior (often) doesn't satisfy von Neumann-Morgenstern utility axioms (the coherence conditions for scale-free origin-free utility functions as prefered by behavioral economics).
>Edit: but yes, human behavior (often) doesn't satisfy von Neumann-Morgenstern utility axioms (the coherence conditions for scale-free origin-free utility functions as prefered by behavioral economics).
In specific, the VNM axioms assume that preferences aren't over histories at all, but instead over states, which severely constrains the kind of outcome-generating process they allow an agent to care about. They effectively state, "only the end-point matters, not the trajectory". This doesn't really make sense for humans in the first place, since we're made of meat and need to do things like eat and sleep cyclically.
What it does make sense for is bank accounts, which is why economists think it makes sense.
> the VNM axioms assume that preferences aren't over histories at all, but instead over states
That depends on how you formulate the axioms; or, equivalently, how you formulate the state.
Eg, you can construct a vNM agent that strongly avoids "outcomes" where it spend a week awake, even if the end state of the world the agent is operating in retains no information about that. The "outcomes" A_i of the vNM axioms are (potentially) the entire observable history of the agent's universe.
Such a preference ordering has nothing to do with real numbers or expected values, though. Orderings don't by themselves lead to real numbers without some sort of countability or Archimedean requirement, and they certainly don't lead to expected values without quite a bit more.
(IMO Savage's Theorem[0] provides a better foundation than VNM, but that's nitpicking.)
What's the point? After reading a few paragraphs, the guy talks about promoting new research... About what? The article is so meta I stopped reading because I had no idea what he was talking about.
Thank you for the unsurprising reference asserting that much of psychology is garbage. I submit that not reading the book based only on that reference would be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Totally agree that the contents of the bathtub by weight are mostly dirty water. It's worth getting your hands wet for the baby though.
He lost me when he started disparaging math. How is it science without falsifiability, and how useful would such a science be without inference and extrapolation? He cites Khaneman and Thaler, who are both intensely focused on statistical reasoning. Sunstein is a legal scholar. Nassim Taleb is a hedge fund manager with a chair at NYU's school of engineering.
This guy is a advertizing executive. His job is literally conning people into giving him publicity cheap. Edge bit, hook, line, and sinker.
He undermines his message at the end, talking about airport security lines. They are irritating because they are BS, meaningless security theater, from beginning to end. They are stressful because they create uncertainty about whether we will miss our flight, and whether we will have our property confiscated, or be incarcerated for things we have no control over, or our pants will slip down when we take our belts off.
Security theater is there to create the impression that something is being done when nothing can be. The stressful experience is the entire purpose of the operation.
I find the statement "Markets actually work because they're adaptive. Bad things get killed, good new things sometimes get promoted" to be incredibly naive. Markets don't kill "bad things" – tobacco and other addictive drugs are multibillion dollar markets, and ineffective medicines like homeopathy and bogus folk medicine have been doing just fine for centuries.
> "Why don't you [the astrophysicist] just bugger off to a bank for three years, make a stack of money, and then return with the freedom to do what you like?" And he said, "Disappearing off to work in a bank for three years is career suicide."
Although the IQ of the average astrophysicist is probably higher than the average banker, quant, or whatever, it seems far from certain that the astrophysicist will make a stack of money and become financially independent in 3 years.
> Although the IQ of the average astrophysicist is probably higher than the average banker, quant, or whatever, it seems far from certain that the astrophysicist will make a stack of money and become financially independent in 3 years.
I think this is dismissive of the intellectual capacity of quants (which are not at all your average banker), and too flattering of the intellectual capacity of academics.
More importantly, I think you haven't met many quants. Most of them WERE astrophysicists (and mathematicians and statisticians and from other computation-heavy academic backgrounds). If you have a PhD in physics, you can battle for one of the few slots in academia and deal with politics and favoritism and backstabbing and insultingly-low pay, or you can go to Wall Street and make a fortune.
Well, yes. They're handing out large six-figure starting salaries to computational mathematicians. Relative to adjunct professor or junior researcher salaries, it's a fortune. And that's before you've proven yourself successful. I was being hyperbolic, but not completely.
I lament that finance and tech slurp up all the scientists, as I love science. It doesn't pay off for nearly as many people as the alternatives, though.
I think once for those in the best school, especially in England, banking was very much a club where certain people could count on guaranteed money and success.
I don't think it works that way any more but the idea could still be there in people's minds.
That's probably because the astrophysicist spends 99% of his time thinking about astrophysics, and only 1% of his time about personal finance. Normal people, however ...
> The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they're completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays.
One, even monks worried about status (though perhaps in different terms). Two, I think academics are generally perfectly self-aware about their relationship with status, and I don't think they are significantly different from other professions. I don't think it usually hinges on parking spaces though.