What’s the Difference Between Chris Rock and Allen Iverson?

Posted on by David Wright

Chris Rock cares about practice. Iverson desn’t (commentary).

When beginning to work on a new show, Rock picks venues where he can experiment with new material in very rough fashion. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between forty and fifty appearances at a small comedy club, called Stress Factory, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. In front of audiences of, say, fifty people, he will show up unannounced, carrying a yellow legal note pad with ideas scribbled on it…

In sets that run around forty-five minutes, most of the jokes fall flat. His early performances can be painful to watch. Jokes will ramble, he’ll lose his train of thought and need to refer to his notes, and some audience members sit with their arms folded, noticeably unimpressed. The audience will laugh about his flops— laughing at him, not with him. Often Rock will pause and say, “This needs to be fleshed out more if it’s gonna make it,” before scribbling some notes. He may think he has come up with the best joke ever, but if it keeps missing with audiences, that becomes his reality. Other times, a joke he thought would be a dud will bring the house down…

For a full routine, Rock tries hundreds (if not thousands) of preliminary ideas, out of which only a handful will make the final cut… By the time Rock reaches a big show— say an HBO special or an appearance on David Letterman— his jokes, opening, transitions, and closing have all been tested and retested rigorously. Developing an hour-long act takes even top comedians from six months to a year. If comedians are serious about success, they get on stage every night they can, especially when developing new material. They typically do so at least five nights per week, sometimes up to seven, and sweat over every element and word. And the cycle repeats, day in, day out.

Big Data To Cure Cancer? Matter of Time

Posted on by David Wright

I almost can’t believe this is happening. Incredibly exciting. Get used to these kinds of projects.

In 2007, Ian Clements was given a year to live. He was diagnosed with terminal metastatic bladder cancer. Ian began charting, quantifying, and recording as much of his life as possible in an effort to learn which lifestyle behaviors have the greatest impact on his cancer.

Ian has fought his disease successfully for five years, and now he asks the Kaggle community to look at his data to see what significant correlations and connections we can find. We at Kaggle are humbled by his efforts and want to help Ian share his data with the wider world by hosting it on our website.

This is an exercise in collaborative data exploration rather than a standard Kaggle competition. The ideal result would be a model suggesting which lifestyle behaviors may have the greatest effect on Ian’s health, but any insights into his dataset are welcome. While we understand it may not be possible to extrapolate insights from this dataset to the overall population, it will nevertheless be very helpful for Ian in generating hypotheses and suggesting different behaviors. We hope that you will find it interesting to take a look and see what you can find.

Dear youths of the world: GET INTO THIS FIELD.

Left Wing And Right Wing. Why They Don’t Get Along.

Posted on by David Wright

Scott Sumner with an outstanding blog post. One of the best I’ve ever read.

Let’s assume Krugman was correct [about everything – DW].  Why wouldn’t the left gradually win the vigorous debate among intellectuals?  Why wouldn’t the gradual accumulation of facts tend to discredit one model and support the other?  Isn’t the intellectual debate in the blogosphere a sort of Darwinian struggle?

Krugman’s answer is that the right is dishonest.

Scott figures they’re both partly right.

…If I’m right that both sides are partly correct, then you’d expect the most successful countries on Earth to embody ideas from both sides of the spectrum, and they do.

Another point I’d make is that whereas left wing pundits are right about some issues, and right wing pundits are right about other issues, the markets are always right.  Now that’s a pretty bold assertion, so let me qualify it.  I don’t mean the market have perfect foresight, and can predict the future.  And I am restricting this claim to policies about efficiency, supply-side and demand-side policies, not egalitarian policies.  My claim is that the markets are left-wing on the need for adequate AD, and right-wing on the need for sound pro-growth supply-side policies.  The markets believe that each side of the ideological debate has a sort of blind spot—the left underestimates the importance of incentives, and the right underestimates the damage done by demand shortfalls.

Scott could easily have mentioned Robin Hanson and prediction markets. The problem here is that the left and right have a BIAS, which they are unable to break free from. Markets help to overcome this bias

.

Interview With John Seo

Posted on by David Wright

One of the most impressive person in the Insurance Linked Securities market. One of the most impressive I’ve ever met, period. He’s more thoughtful, knowledgable and just plain nice than I think I ever have a chance of being.

Here’s an interesting comment:

Lehman publicly disclosed a minimum risk capital commitment of US$500 million via Lehman Re, but we had authority to go much further than that. That was the largest risk-taking ILS group in the late 1990’s that I am aware of.

The rest is here. Here’s a Michael Lewis profile of John. I didn’t really like it much.

Two Quotes of Quotes

Posted on by David Wright

Galvan noted that the response pattern of teen brains is essentially the same response curve of a seasoned drug addict. Their reward center cannot be stimulated by low doses—they need the big jolt to get pleasure.

and…

Then Axe faced another big problem. Insecure high school students had been so convincingly persuaded that Axe would make them sexually appealing that they began completely dousing themselves in it. After all, if Axe = sex, then more Axe = more sex, right? According to CBC News, “Some boys have been dousing themselves in Axe, apparently believing commercials that show a young man applying the deodorant and being immediately hit on by beautiful women.” It got to the point where the students were reeking so heavily of it that it was becoming a distraction at school. So much so that in Minnesota, school district officials attempted to ban it, claiming that “the man spray has been abused, and the aerosol stench is a hazard for students and faculty.” The principal of one Canadian school started actually confiscating bottles of Axe. “They spray it all over their heads and their necks,” one teacher said. “They don’t realize how powerful the odor is. . . . They have no idea how much it takes to be a walking stink bomb [which is] basically what they are.”

All from Eric Barker.

Underdogs Are The Elite. And They’re Mean About It

Posted on by David Wright

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess…

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity.

…If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

That’s David Brooks.

I’m intrigued by the idea that we live in a world where people who adopt the underdog mentality run the show. It sure helps to feel that way when you’re competing hard, so maybe this is necessary. Maybe without the buzz of existential threat, nobody would ever work hard enough to fuel economic growth?

Ugh. I struggle with this kind of moralistic commentary. I get the narrative objective here but I’m rarely convinced by any of it, particularly when someone is foolish enough to justify policy with these arguments. If Brooks is right, what the hell are we supposed to do about it? Interesting observations, sure, but that’s all they can be.

Is it plausible that there were there middle aged white guys in 1915 writing about how “the kids these days don’t have any respect for the things that matter! It was all better in the old days when people cared about their work!”? Sure is. And that really takes the heat out of this argument for me.

We all want to feel like dad is out there doing the right thing for us. But human society ceased behaving like a collection of families thousands of years ago.

Medicine, *BIG* Data and $$$

Posted on by David Wright

Another tour de force from SBM. How does one summarize? I almost blogged this NYT article about treating Leukmia last week but felt I had nothing to add (go read it!). I should have known SBM would deliver the goods, though.

Here’s the big data part:

Taking the results of the sequencing of the entire genome and RNAseq data and analyzing them allows scientists to probe the genome and transcriptome of cancers in a way that was never before possible. It produces an enormous amount of data, too, terabytes from a single experiment. At cancer meetings I’ve been to, investigators frequently refer to a “firehose” of data, petabytes in magnitude.

I’ll offer comment on this part:

There’s no doubt that “individualized” medicine will become increasingly a part of modern medical care, with the individualization based on sequencing the genomes and transcriptomes of patients. In just a few years, the price of a complete genome sequence has fallen from hundreds of thousands of dollars to around $15,000. True, that doesn’t count all the analysis and that’s $15,000 per genome, which means at least $30,000 to sequence a normal and cancerous genome. There are, however, lots of things we do in medicine that cost $15,000. The price doesn’t have to come down much more before whole genome sequencing starts to look doable for individual patients. After all, gene tests like the OncoType DX cost on the order of $3,000 to $4,000, and we now order this test fairly routinely for patients with estrogen receptor-positive, node-negative breast cancer because in the end it saves a lot of patients from unnecessary chemotherapy.

The bottom line is that at some point every single person is going to get their genome sequenced. That’s about 4m newborns per year after the backlog of 330m+ people. But here’s the thing with cancer, it’s a genetic disease, which means that the cancer itself has a different genome than yours. Finding those differences is the entire point of genetic therapy.

So $3,500 per genome x 35,000 leukemia patients per year = $122m of new health care costs per year. No big deal, right? Well how about the 1.5m people who get diagnosed with all cancers per year?

Genome sequencing is going to be a gigantic business very, very soon. The health care cost curve is bending, all right.

Dear Geeks of Sport and Science: Feast On THIS

Posted on by David Wright

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
– Ellen McManis
Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We’ll suppose it’s a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.:

The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.

That’s xkcd‘s new blog. And there’s this incredible illustration:

And much much more.

The most exciting blog idea I’ve come across in years? Yep.

Banks And Insurers: Full of Fail?

Posted on by David Wright

This is a neat little paper: How Complex Systems Fail. It is short, it is simple and it is absolutely PACKED with insight. Here is are some excerpts:

5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.
A corollary to the preceding point is that complex systems run as broken systems. The system continues to function because it contains so many redundancies and because people can make it function, despite the presence of many flaws. After accident reviews nearly always note that the system has a history of prior ‘proto-accidents’ that nearly generated catastrophe. Arguments that these degraded conditions should have been recognized before the overt accident are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance. System operations are dynamic, with components (organizational, human, technical) failing and being replaced continuously
…
7. Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.
Because overt failure requires multiple faults, there is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident… The evaluations based on such reasoning as ‘root cause’ do not reflect a technical understanding of the nature of failure but rather the social, cultural need to blame specific, localized forces or events for outcomes.

One thing that strikes me about the paper is that the author (probably deliberately) does not try to define what a complex system is. In a sense the paper is a definition of a complex system, which is to say that they are defined by how they fail. Or, perhaps like with pornography: you know it when you see it.

I can see two ways that a complex system can develop and operate: top down or bottom up. Bottom up systems get to be much much more complex, yet I would say that they are much less prone to failure. Perhaps that last sentence is saying the same thing twice.

I think of this in terms of risk management at insurance companies or banks. You can imagine that a weak grasp of how systems fail could be financially ruinous: for example, by an executive believing he/she has a better grasp for the ‘root cause’ of why failures occur.

To run a complex system perhaps requires humility in the face of something you simply cannot understand.

One Trade To Rule Them All And In the Darkness Bind Them

Posted on by David Wright

David Merkel analyzes LIBOR submissions from the crisis.

My initial diagnosis is this: whether formally or informally, you have two groups of banks submitting rates for LIBOR.  One group is trying to pull LIBOR up, the other is trying to pull LIBOR down.  Statistically, if I add up their intercept terms from the first table, they both sum to 0.23%, one positive, the other negative.  Even if LIBOR were a simple average, which it is not, this is a colossal game of tug of war, with two equal teams.

As it is, LIBOR excludes the outliers, and calculates an average off of those that remain.  It’s a difficult measure to manipulate.  There may have been attempts to manipulate LIBOR, and even two groups of banks trying to pull LIBOR their own way, but successful systemic manipulation of LIBOR is unlikely in my opinion.

One thing I didn’t fully understand when I was reading about the scandal was what would motivate these traders to want to influence the submissions. How could they benefit?

Could it be that half of these banks were on one side of a giant credit trade and half on the other? Talk about a zero-sum game!