*** The Official CUCKposting thread ***

[Poopadoop]

You're allowed to not like math, but the assertion that you're bad at it for any reason aside from practice is not true for most people. I agree that some people need less practice than others. I can't agree with a cop-out being used by intelligent people to avoid learning.

This is different from my own admittedly small sample conclusion, and I suspect may reflect the fact that if you can't do math you are not going to try physics. In psychology, I have encountered many people who can do logic, language, and analytical thinking but no matter how you try to explain it cannot do math much further than 2+2=4. The problem i feel in my field is such people aren't being weeded out because the math we do is sufficiently complicated that it is rare for any of them to be evaluated by anyone who is capable of understanding why what they are doing is wrong.

A simple example might illustrate my point: i recently reviewed a paper in which the authors analysed their data in a silly way. When I pointed that out, their counter was that they agreed with me but that someone had recently published a paper using the same silly analysis, so therefore it was ok. I don't even know what to say at this point....
.

[Savy]

A simple example might illustrate my point: i recently reviewed a paper in which the authors analysed their data in a silly way. When I pointed that out, their counter was that they agreed with me but that someone had recently published a paper using the same silly analysis, so therefore it was ok. I don't even know what to say at this point....

Rather than being a dick I mean this quite genuinely even though I'm sure you'll take offence to it. Maybe try thinking about what you should say or do that makes a difference to this happening. That isn't stupidity it's laziness & bad practise. None of which are signs of not being able to do Math. Now I'm sure these people probably don't understand the maths well enough to have a real concept of what it is they are doing wrong and why it's so bad but this is never going to be the case especially when applying stats to non-mathematical fields.

If you want to change this (which you have said you do) then you kind of need to take responsibility for this. Correcting people is a really shit way of fixing their habits, especially when there are thousands of people doing the same thing.

[Poopadoop]

Rather than being a dick I mean this quite genuinely even though I'm sure you'll take offence to it. Maybe try thinking about what you should say or do that makes a difference to this happening. That isn't stupidity t's laziness & bad practise. None of which are signs of not being able to do Math. Now I'm sure these people probably don't understand the maths well enough to have a real concept of what it is they are doing wrong and why it's so bad but this is never going to be the case especially when applying stats to non-mathematical fields.

If you want to change this (which you have said you do) then you kind of need to take responsibility for this.

Correcting people is a really shit way of fixing their habits, especially when there are thousands of people doing the same thing.

I think your argument is genuine and makes a good point.

to the first bolded: I think it's unclear which it is. They can defend themselves equally well either way. They can say e.g., yes we understand but that's how it's always been done' whether they don't understand or do understand and don't give a shit. So their counter is ambiguous.

The second bolded bit is really the crux of the matter. Without going into detail, their analysis is based on the presumption that people can react to something they see by pressing a button within 1/10 of a second. Anyone who knows the basic time frame of stimulus-->neurons --> muscles knows that's (fucking) impossible. So my view is not that they're incapable of seeing this, but that they find it easier/better/whatever to base their analysis of the data on the idea that it is possible, for reasons known only to themselves, on an assumption that is silly.

third bold: In this case, I am not the one who ultimately decides if a paper gets published. So my responsibility is to tell the editor this is bullshit or this is reasonably solid. After that it's on them.

last bold: that's a perfectly good point, but reaching a wider audience isn't possible when reviewing a single paper. That requires a more general treatise of a much broader subject which both you and my colleagues agree needs to be presented to a general audience. I am one of those presenting such a treatise but nonetheless I can only deal with this specific example of foolishness in its own context at this specific time.

[wufwugy]

This is different from my own admittedly small sample conclusion, and I suspect may reflect the fact that if you can't do math you are not going to try physics. In psychology, I have encountered many people who can do logic, language, and analytical thinking but no matter how you try to explain it cannot do math much further than 2+2=4. The problem i feel in my field is such people aren't being weeded out because the math we do is sufficiently complicated that it is rare for any of them to be evaluated by anyone who is capable of understanding why what they are doing is wrong.

A simple example might illustrate my point: i recently reviewed a paper in which the authors analysed their data in a silly way. When I pointed that out, their counter was that they agreed with me but that someone had recently published a paper using the same silly analysis, so therefore it was ok. I don't even know what to say at this point....
.

Paging Nassim Taleb.

[Poopadoop]

Paging Nassim Taleb.

My take on Taleb is that he's a gifted mathematician who for whatever reason tried to apply his skills to a field to which they aren't suited and then got butthurt when they weren't appreciated by people in a field they weren't suited to. He then pointed out what a waste of his talent that field was and everyone knowledgeable about maths agreed and everyone else got the other message that certain fields have too much variance for anyone trying to find some predictive parameter to make a useful model.

At least I think the latter message is worth communicating to economists who would otherwise argue that they know how a butterfly flapping its wings can affect the economy.

To me this is a bit 'no shit' - something like Tolstoy saying that Math doesn't appreciate literary genius.

[wufwugy]

My take on Taleb is that he's a gifted mathematician who for whatever reason tried to apply his skills to a field to which they aren't suited and then got butthurt when they weren't appreciated by people in a field they weren't suited to. He then pointed out what a waste of his talent that field was and everyone knowledgeable about maths agreed and everyone else got the other message that certain fields have too much variance for anyone trying to find some predictive parameter to make a useful model.

I don't know this history. I just read his tweets and his articles sometimes. Can you give a nutshell of what happened?

[Poopadoop]

I don't know this history. I just read his tweets and his articles sometimes. Can you give a nutshell of what happened?

My personal synopsis of Taleb's narrative is that he went into the field of high finance for the purpose of becoming wealthy (why else would you go into high finance, not for a love of maths certainly?), realized it had limited or no benefit for a math genius (the variance outweighed the mean by a bigly amount), argued such and such with who and who, and came to the conclusion that there is a better way to explain economic vagaries than the normal distribution. That last bit in itself is a clear and worthy insight. There is no credit denied there. Absolutely the man is clever at math.

But to anyone knowledgeable in maths his contribution is not in showing the limitations of math to a chaotic system ( pretty sure Tulving managed the same argument in the 1940s, and Nash fairly soon afterwards), but in showing to people who don't understand math that doing math is fucking hard no matter how good your are at it, and if you do it wrong you can come to the wrong answer with the best of intentions.

[wufwugy]

Taleb has convinced me that he is worth listening to, but that doesn't mean he has convinced me that what he says is worth believing.

[wufwugy]

I love the IYI and the skin in the game thing. Some people have head in ass syndrome. It's real.