
This Thing for Which We Have No Name (2014) - DiabloD3
https://www.edge.org/conversation/rory_sutherland-this-thing-for-which-we-have-no-name
======
_emacsomancer_
I found the beginning of this perplexing:

> 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.

~~~
ISL
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.

~~~
tlb
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.

~~~
adrianratnapala
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.

------
Sniffnoy
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
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.

~~~
Sniffnoy
I mean, assuming the behavior satisfies appropriate coherence conditions...
(which actual human behavior doesn't as Misdicorl points out, but that's
another matter).

~~~
a1369209993
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).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>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.

~~~
a1369209993
> 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.

------
gwbas1c
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.

~~~
codetrotter
He talks a lot about psychology. I found it an interesting read.

~~~
killjoywashere
Read Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you want to delve into
this.

~~~
ahelwer
Except entire chapters of that book are completely unscientific garbage, most
notably the one on priming. See this:
[https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-
of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/)

~~~
killjoywashere
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.

------
killjoywashere
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.

------
ncmncm
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.

------
nautilus12
The video in the article is a wealth of knowledge that the article itself
doesnt scratch the surface of doing justice

~~~
frogpelt
Isn't the article basically a summarized transcript of the video?

EDIT: Also, I imagine anyone who spends lunch with this guy just gets to
listen. He is a bloviating pontificator if I've ever seen one.

~~~
loa-in-backup
Could you elaborate more?

------
thedailymail
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.

------
mysterypie
> _" 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.

~~~
caymanjim
> _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.

~~~
Retra
Oh, it's that easy? Just walk on over to wall street and make a fortune? Are
they just handing them out or something?

~~~
caymanjim
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.

