the mind of a con man

“The tone of his talks, he said, was “Let’s not talk about the plumbing, the nuts and bolts — that’s for plumbers, for statisticians.””

As I got a tablet last week and immediately subscribed to the New York Times, I started reading papers from recent editions and got to this long article of April 26, by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee on Diederik Stapel, the Dutch professor of psychology who used fake data in dozens of papers and PhD theses.

“In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity.”

This article is rather puzzling in its presentation of the facts. While Stapel acknowledges making up the data that conveniently supported his theses, the journalist’s analysis is fairly ambivalent, for instance considering that faking data is a “lesser threat to the integrity of science than the massaging of data and selective reporting of experiments”. At the beginning of the article, Stapel is shown going back to places where his experiments were supposed to have taken place, but he “could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment”, making it sound as if he had forgotten…

“Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing (…) People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus (…) They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.”

The above quote from Stapel is even more puzzling, as if giving the same talk in different places is an unacceptable academic behaviour, in par with faking data and plagiarism… I do give the same talk in several conferences and seminars, mostly to different people and I do not see a problem with this. If I persist in this behaviour, it will get boring to people who see the same talk over and over, and it should lead to me not being invited to conferences or seminars any longer, but there is nothing unethical or a-scientific in this. Another illustration of the ambivalence of both the character and the article. I frankly dislike this approach to fraud, a kind of “50 shades of lies”, where all academics get under suspicion that one way or another they also acted un-ethically and in their own interest rather than towards the advancement of Science…

weakonomics

Believe it or not, I had never read Freakonomics..! Therefore, when I saw the book on sale for a negligible price in Dehli Airport—great airport by the way!—, I went for it. Having now read a fair chunk of the book (or unfair chunk, see below!) within two days (during my metro rides), I am rather disappointed by the content and thus puzzled by the then-craze about the book. (Andrew just loved it!) Freakonomics is certainly a well-designed product from a salesman perspective and it thus reads pleasantly enough, but I find it remains at too much of a superficial level. In addition, it sometimes sounds as if the authors have a hidden agenda (more later)! (Now, of course, my reaction of the book is completely irrelevant as it comes very late after the publication in 2005. So, reader,  stop here if you do not want to waste time any further!)

“…if the death penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge.” (p.118)

To wit, the way the book is written sounds much more journalistic than academic: the authors take an economic study or paper about an unusual (freakish) topic and weave a nice story around it, always with the intent of showing “conventional wisdom” is wrong. Since this is a general public book, there is no theory behind the story and it all seems to flow from “common sense”: yes, most drug dealers do not earn enough to make a living because the corporate structure of the drug economy is highly hierarchical and as highly biased towards higher levels. The only foray into theory, namely the discussion about factors impacting kids success rate at school, casts doubts about regression and the distinction between causation and correlation is never truly investigated (even though the mantra correlation is not causation is found therein often enough!). Moreover, by resorting to the journalistic trick of making everything very personal (so-and-so went to drug dealer housing projects for six years, so-and-so decided to re-analyse the school records in Chicago, &tc.), the authors actually lower the credentials of their theories. If so-and-so found this effect, maybe there is another or an hundred others so-and-so going the opposite way! But those others are not mentioned as the book retains this flatland and Unitarian perspective… And the conclusions are anti-climactic: when so-and-so gets hold of the ledgers of a crack dealing gang, the description stops at reporting the hierarchical structure of the organisation and the revenues of the different levels. No major theory appears to be tested. At least within the book.

“Given the number of handguns in the United States (…), the probability that a particular gun was used to kill someone that year is 1 in 10,000. The typical gun buyback yields fewer than 1,000 guns—which translates into an expectation of less than one-tenth of one homicide per buyback.” (p.121)

The above quote puzzled me for a while, until I formalised the experiment as an hypergeometric draw of 1000 guns from a population of almost 300 millions guns, out of which more than 10,000 are crime guns. (The probability that a particular gun is used for a crime is then 1 in 30,000.) And the probability to draw at least one of those guns in one buyback is then approximately 0.03. But this seems to miss the other side of the equation, namely the worth of a human life. (Not that I believe that gun buybacks are particularly effective since, as noted by the authors, they mostly attract “heirldom or junk” (p.121).)

A minor disappointment was to stumble upon the conclusion of the book in…its very middle! I first thought I was confused and this was only the conclusion to a section but no, the second half of the book as I bought it was made of extracts from the authors’ column in the New York Time and of their blog, getting close to a swindle in my opinion! Or at least being the unfair chunk mentioned above. I also find annoying (and so does Andrew!) this insistence upon being rogue economists, as advertised on the front cover of the book, as the authors have shown themselves to be very efficient economists by turning the freakonomics idea into a whole business: books, films, videos, lectures, &tc. Nothing to complain about, except for the rogue label. (Note that they should have registered the franchise as well, given the subsequent profusion of -omics books and sites, from the fantastic Freakonometrics blog of my former colleague Arthur Charpentier, to Soccernomics I recently bought for my son…)

the fractalist

Definitely a cool—if borderline hairy—cover…! I have not read The Fractalist, which is an auto-biography of Benoît Mandelbrot, who passed away in 2010. (The title itself is not bad either, ringing both of fatalist as in Diderot, and catalyst as in, er… catalyst! I do not know if it was suggested by Mandelbrot himself or by an editor after he passed away.) It was however mentioned in a book review I read in the New York Times on my way back to Paris. The reviewer, Dwight Garner, is rather critical of the memoir:

`To read “The Fractalist” is to examine a brain — Mandelbrot’s — that can seem to reside in a jar. There is almost nothing about his wife, his two sons or his other interests (if he had any), besides music. His ego is perhaps too apparent. To put my complaints in Mandelbrotian terms, this book lacks a sort of glorious roughness. It reads like a lightly annotated curriculum vitae.’

and states in the final paragraph that `Beautiful minds don’t always write beautiful books. Life isn’t fair that way.‘ I am thus rather reserved about writing a CHANCE review of this book, esp. because I never came close to use any of Mandelbrot’s work. Now, if any ‘Og reader is interested in writing such a review, send it to me and I will consider it with the utmost attention! (Just to be crystal-clear on this: I have not received a copy of The Fractalist from the editor and do not plan to request one. So potential reviewers will have to purchase the book on their own funds.)

NYT persp’ on Melbourne

I came upon this New York Times argument for placing Melbourne in #15 among the 41 places to go in 2011:

With a bunch of new hotels and restaurants led by notable chefs cropping up, Melbourne has been stealing the spotlight from its sister city, Sydney. The most notable addition comes from the luxury brand Crown, which is investing 1 billion Australian dollars (about the same in U.S. dollars) to expand its sprawling Crown Entertainment Complex on the southern bank of the Yarra River. In April it opened Australia’s largest hotel, the 300-million-dollar 658-room Crown Metropol, which has an infinity pool on the 27th floor with 180-degree views of the city, and is home to the Maze and Maze Grill, the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s first endeavors Down Under. The complex also includes the Crown Towers hotel, which has four private penthouse gaming salons with 360-degree views of Melbourne’s skyline.

The city’s thriving arts scene now has stylish boutique hotels to match, too. Three Art Series Hotels, inspired by (and featuring the works of) famous artists, opened in the last year. The Olsen, named for the landscape painter John Olsen, is the flagship of the group, with 229 rooms (from 215 dollars a night) and a heated, glass-bottomed swimming pool.

Visiting foodies will be able to choose from a number of new restaurants. In October, the Australian chef Neil Perry, of Rockpool in Sydney, opened Spice Temple, a 200-seat contemporary Szechuan restaurant next door to his Rockpool Bar & Grill in the Crown complex, as well as a new bar, the Waiting Room, in the lobby of the Crown Towers hotel. Also within the Crown complex, a new seafood restaurant, the Atlantic, will debut in February with Donovan Cooke as executive chef.

This is fairly puzzling, Not the fact that Melbourne is on the list, of course, this is indeed an attractive and thriving city I enjoyed living in the past two weeks. But the reasons provided here are just so unappealing. A new expensive hotel? Duh.  A new restaurant? Doh. (Plus, there already is a highly rated Spice Temple in Sydney! Why bother with a replica?) Reading through the series with a new eye makes me seriously wonder if this is anything else but covert advertising… (In the 2012 version of this NYT list, Montpellier appears as the French entry…not for its beautiful medieval centre but for its modern architecture and for its tramway, which has been completed but which construction created such a traffic nightmare over the years I have visited Jean-Michel Marin there.)

Oxford, Miss. [Le Monde travel guide]

The weekend edition of Le Monde has a pseudo-travel guide written by a local writer about his or her town. It is necessarily partial and subjective, but often interesting. It also sometimes mentions towns one would never dream of visiting. This week (18/02/2012), this tribune most unexpectedly focus on Oxford, Mississippi, that I visited two and a half years ago for MaxEnt 2009. (The writer in charge is Tom Franklin. Not that I ever heard of him…) I find it quite puzzling that Le Monde spends two pages on this little town where the only attraction worth mentioning is Faulkner’s family home, now turned into a museum, and where the (decent) local bookstore is the only place in town one can buy the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, the highlights are local bars and cafés… I wonder if any Le Monde reader will be induced by the guide to travel to this place.