Emanuel Derman

Lately it has become fashionable to disparage intuition in favor of careful statistical analysis.

Me, I’m still a fan of intuition. Intuition isn’t merely quick thinking. It’s an arrow to the heart of things. Sometimes, maybe often, it’s an arrow that misses, but when it doesn’t it’s the deepest form of perception. Once the arrow tells you where to look, slow thinking will help confirm or negate its mark. But without the arrow, there’s no target to think slowly about.

Dave Edwards recently wrote:

There are three ‘styles of knowing’:

1. Euclidean: Basic principles are clear and precise and consistent with one another; examples: Euclidean geometry, classical mechanics, von Neumann’s quantum mechanics.

2. Heuristic: Basic principles are clear and precise but inconsistent with one another; examples: chess strategies, legal systems, expert systems in A.I. using non-monotonic logic.

3. Intuitive: Basic principles don’t exist or are ineffable or tacit. Mastery usually involves apprenticeship, imitation, massive practice; examples: philosophy, mathematics, science, carpentry, language, chess-almost all human skills!

Similarly, Spinoza wrote that the highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, is to understand things by the intuitive kind of knowledge.

Therefore, I can’t get too excited about intuition’s flaws.

If you give me a choice, as a scientist or an artist, as to which kind of knowledge I’d like more of, I’ll have more intuition.

It’s all we’ve got, really.

I have been visiting family in Hong Kong for ten days, a place I’ve been to many times before for business, but always so briefly that I never really paid much attention to anything other than work and getting a run in.

This time, in Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Macau, the thing that has impressed itself on me through airports and downtowns is the bombardment of luxury advertising: Vertu conspicuous consumption cellphones, fancy hotels, apartment complexes, jewelry …. And the presence of luxury stores in profusion. Kowloon main street is a mile-long luxury mall, block after block jammed with super designer stores, multiple Tiffany’s, literally several Chow Tai Fooks per block, etc. These stores run at constant density for a long long distance and then fade rapidly into a few midscale stores for only a few blocks, and then suddenly you’re into Yau Ma Tei. The slope is very steep; one minute it’s luxury, then it’s hotels advertising two-hour rooms and some areas that look like Blade Runner’s LA.

I’m only sampling, not doing detailed statistical analysis, so forgive the exaggeration. But what strikes me is the rapid gradient from oligarchic wives’ appeal to very very survivalist stuff. In New York it feels to me as though the big ads are for H&M, Zara, Banana Republic … Uniqlo has bus-stop ads with Susan Sarandon touting cheap cashmere sweaters, aiming at old middle class people trying to buy cheaper nice stuff. Here, I don’t see ads aimed at middle class people. I see ads and stores aimed at people with lots of money to throw away, or people who aspire to that. It’s a little sad.

A Chinese friend of mine says there is no middle class in Asia, only super rich and very poor. I don’t know how true that is, but it explains the advertising.

Macau, with its really charming IndoChine (well, Portuguese colonial) old city seems a bit of a counterexample. The old city stretches for kilometers (I was expecting a few prettified blocks) and is reminiscent of Mediterranean towns, very different from Hong Kong. My son says it’s the difference between British Colonial and Portuguese Colonial, and it seems right. The old city, though it’s not well off, still has a kind of surviving working-class feel as you get away from the giant gambling emporiums, though maybe that’s where they all work.

Moving between ferries and airports, insulated and seeing the superrich ads, I thought about Fifties America. I didn’t live there, and was still a child, but it seems to me that what Fifties America did was bring bourgeois stuff to the masses: mixmasters, refrigerators, stoves, ACs, televisions, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, suburban houses, and advertising for them. Nixon showed Khrushchev modern kitchens. 2010s Asia ads seem more focused on conspicuous luxury rather than convenience.

It says something, and that something doesn’t seem good.

Nassim Taleb highlighted economists’ and mankind’s ability to be fooled by randomness. Part of the reason economists and traders are likely to be fooled is because, underlying everything they do is the statistics of what is ultimately human behavior.

I’ve always had a guilty feeling about disliking statistics. When I came to graduate school in physics I almost didn’t take a course in statistical mechanics, a beautiful subject eventually taught to me in a class by T. D. Lee that turned out to be one of the best courses I ever took. I was put off by adjective ‘statistical’, which I misunderstood and therefore scorned. I believed in mechanics; I wanted explanations and I thought statistical mechanics would dodge them.

I was wrong. Statistical mechanics explains the properties of macroscopic matter from averaging over the microscopic properties of its constituents, and, vice versa, deduces the qualities of the microscopic constituents from macroscopic behavior.

The good side of my prejudice is that I don’t think I have often been fooled by randomness.  I like to come at the world assuming that everything human and physical has a dynamical cause or structure that can be discovered. Some examples I like:

• The laws for what makes something kosher reveal a structure of belief.
• Spinoza tried to penetrate the relationships between human passions, and tried to figure out how to use those relationships to overcome subservience to the passions.
• Freud speculated on the causes of dreams and slips of the tongue, arguing that these occurrences are not random but rather evidence of internal mental structures.
• And what I like about Zizek’s YouTube videos is that he’s always observing apparently random occurrences in society with a view to finding motive and meaning in them.

No single event is really random, not even evolutionary events. It’s only the distribution that’s random.

Attributing retrospective causes to numerical patterns created by human behavior is indeed close to folly.

But looking for patterns, explanations, laws, meaning and relationships in all fields — that’s science and art, and interesting.

Self-schooled in finance and unschooled in economics, I was very glad to be sent a link to Hayek’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture.  I’ve read around him, but not much in the original. One of these days …

As I read it, one of his many important points is the following:

Traditional quantitative science models rest on a basis one level down of either accurate theories (Maxwell’s equations, say, as I mention in my book) or reliable heuristics. In contrast,  quantitative economic or social science  models have no reliable base to rest on; neither theoretically accurate nor empirically reliable ones. And, at the bottom of the social science chain are  individuals, about whom very little that is quantitatively reliable is known. With individuals at the bottom of the tree, models of complex phenomena in society are going to be wrong. And therefore, social planning based on such models will inevitably go badly awry. Therefore, don’t theorize and act on the wrong theories of complex things you didn’t create and don’t understand.

I have a friend who, when you tell him about something bad that happened to you (“I fell and scraped my knee”) doesn’t address the problem at hand, but goes one level higher (“Yes, well that’s what happens when you run in the presence of a gravitational field”). I call that going meta, and I’m not crazy about it.

I thought of this when I came across a post by Felix Salmon about consultants. When I worked at Goldman Sachs was when I first met professional management consultants, and what most impressed me (Not!) about the ones I met was that they were meta guys with meta-skills rather than actual skills. Few of them lasted long because they weren’t hands on; they were often mere human multiplexers who told you where to go for information rather than how to actually do something.

To go meta productively, you need skills and experience of a practical nature from which you can abstract. To be a boxing coach, you don’t have to be a great boxer, but you should have boxed. To be a programming consultant, you should have been a reasonably good programmer. To be a management consultant, you should have been a manager, made mistakes, recovered from them. I don’t know what management consultants learn in school but I suspect it’s formulaic, and that’s the problem.

I sneakily suspect that management is somewhat like character, can’t be taught to people in business schools or consultancies, and that there can’t really be effective degrees in it.

A couple of nights ago I watched “Lola,” one of the last movies made by the immensely prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, born in 1945 and dead at age 37. I’d seen a bunch of his movies in the Seventies, particularly liking “The Merchant of Four Seasons,” a sad sad movie of inevitability that reminded me a bit of Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthasar.”

“Lola” is executed with great panache, and loosely relevant to economic affairs today. It’s set in a small town in the boom of 1950s West Germany, and is about contagion, the moral kind. There is a business man who does property deals that involve minor amounts of corruption and bribery for the sake of profit. There is a regulator who wants to get things done and is willing to bend the rules for the sake of the greater good, the trickle down, but is otherwise morally kind of upright to the point of extreme primness and naivete in his personal life.

The businessman, a bit like Tony Soprano, runs a whorehouse/sex club/nightclub and enjoys everything that goes with it. The vector of contagion is Lola, his mistress, who, savvy, ambitious and maltreated, temporarily seeks respectability. Eventually, the movie seems to say, you can’t confine corruption.

Lola is absorbing, dramatically filmed, has German-expressionist dramatic scenes of minor debauchery. It was inspired by Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel,” but is much more cynically concerned with politics and morals.

Based on memory, I really recommend “The Merchant of Four Season.” “Lola,” too, is very good.

Au Hasard Balthasar is so sad that I’ve avoided it several times since first seeing it at University of Pennsylvania in the Seventies. According to Wikipedia, Godard wrote of Balthasar: “… this film is really the world in an hour and a half.”

1. I am thoroughly tired of Europe, America, Obama, the Republicans, banks central and peripheral, and everyone’s indignation about the above. And of my own indignation too. It’s affecting my quality of life.
2. Part of this is owing to having worked much too hard and too obsessively over the past year, always trying to do one more thing to get it out of my in-tray. I got to the point where when I woke up in the middle of the night my mind began to race with thoughts of things that “needed” to be done and it became preferable to tackle them rather than try to go back to sleep, even though I knew it was a bad idea. And then, the other part is that the world news really is consistently disturbing and unfair.
3. With this in mind, I have long admired/been jealous of people whom observe the Sabbath, whatever religion. My father often used to claim that the greatest historical contribution to humanity by the Jewish people was the idea of a day of rest, which appears right at the very start of Genesis. When you think about it, having a periodic day of rest isn’t obvious at all. I can’t say my father actually observed it most of the time, very rarely actually, but I see his point. It must be wonderful to rigorously observe one day as a retreat from the world of business, sport, competition, and effort, with intent and habit. I know a few people who do that (actually only one at this point, and he, I suspect, spends most days that way, so maybe it doesn’t count). One day, if I live long enough, I hope to try that myself.
4. It’s quite clear that resting is very antithetical to life today. When I left New York for England in 1975, it was hard to do much of anything on a Sunday. Driving around the city was was a breeze. Shops were closed. And London too was a ghost town after 2pm on Saturdays. When I came back to NYC in 1977 Sunday shopping had begun, and department stores were open for a few short hours. Now Sunday traffic can be the worst of the week, in New York or in London. Not to mention the restless internet.
5. In a way, the world has become aperiodic. You can do anything any time, denying the rule of the sun and the moon and the earth’s rotation. You can even have your periods aperiodically. One big part of this aperiodicity is an attempt to deny time and its working its weary way on you. But to be fair, whereas animals go into heat periodically, adult humans can mate any time, so maybe this tendency to aperiodicity was built into us by evolution. All science and discovery can be regarded as an attempt to short-circuit time by either figuring out the end of the story before Nature gets you there, or trying to prevent Nature from nudging you away from the beginning or the middle.
6. In normal times, when one is very exhausted, either happily or sadly, sleep is a blessing to be embraced, and one yields gratefully to unconsciousness.
7. Re true self-destruction: I have never been tempted. But, occasionally, maybe two or three times, I’ve been in situations where facing reality has been too unpleasant. Neither books nor movies nor people could distract me from what I didn’t want to face. Only sleep brought relief, in the form of a loss of identity and consciousness, a kind of temporary annihilation. Then you sleep, and if you can’t then you drink or take a sleeping pill until you can. That kind of urge for unconsciousness has always been  very occasional and temporary thing for me, Thank God, but by vast analytic continuation I can imagine some extreme form of that urge for unconsciousness and need to avoid oneself. That, I can imagine, would make permanent loss of consciousness a compulsive attraction. It wouldn’t be a plea for help, just such a strong desire for not being that one has to give in. It’s a kind of self-loathing, I would think.
8. I wonder if there isn’t some more final version of this latter feeling, or even the former mere exhaustion, which would constitute the preconditions for a good and timely death.