1. One of Eric Weinstein’s catch-phrases is the DISC, which I think stands for the Distributed Information Suppression Complex.
2. Recently, I was asked if I want to contribute some sections to a guide for college students of first-year economics. In looking at the guide, I was reminded of my frustrations with mainstream economics. The GDP factory. The failure to appreciate intangible factors. The failure to incorporate the business problems posed by the Internet into mainstream courses. My seemingly hopeless moonshot to overthrow neoclassical economics. My attempt with Specialization and Trade that fell with a thud. etc.
3. One idea that I extracted from Jeffrey Friedman’s turgid prose is that the economics profession probably selects for those who believe in and desire technocratic power. That seems to me what drives the DISC in economics. It leads to things like Raj Chetty’s project.
A central part of Opportunity Insights’ mission is to train the next generation of researchers and policy leaders on methods to study and improve economic opportunity and related social problems. This page provides lecture materials and videos for a course entitled “Using Big Data Solve Economic and Social Problems,” taught by Raj Chetty and Greg Bruich at Harvard University.
Gosh, if you were to just link data from tax returns, credit bureaus, and Google searches, imagine how well “seeing like a state” could work. Ugh.
4. Unfortunately, I am Bill. Let me tell you the story of Bill. In 1990, I was promoted to a low-level management position in charge of five people inside Financial Research at Freddie Mac. One of the staff I inherited was Bill. Bill was a very bright guy, the sort who is called a “computer genius” by people who are intimidated by computers, and even by some who are not intimidated. He was older, in his fifties, with the title of “economist” but doing the work of a glorified research assistant. Bill had bounced around different departments at Freddie Mac, as one supervisor would unload him for his performance issues and another would pick him up for his potential and background.
Bill was very popular with the other staff. When they had a gnarly problem in SAS or with installing new software on a PC (this was a challenge in those days), he would help. Unfortunately, he found these problems so interesting that he would gladly drop whatever assignment you gave him in order to work on the tech issues. So if he was supposed to run a report that I needed for a meeting with top management the next day, I could not count on him to do it. He was very distractable.
One day, he distractedly wandered through the tape library for Freddie Mac’s mainframe computers. I have no idea why. He pulled down a tape and, lo and behold, he found data that had been missing for years. It was data from loans that were originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The data was no longer needed for processing the loans, but it was priceless for research purposes. We could now correlate default rates to data from loan applications, such as the original loan-to-value ratio.
I soon hired another research assistant, Sudha. She was far from brilliant, and her computer skills were weak, but she was meticulous and organized. The other staff, who loved Bill, resented Sudha, especially because Bill always ended up doing the work for Sudha’s memos. But when I left my position, my replacement soon said to me, “Now I understand what you were doing. You needed Sudha in order to get Bill’s projects done.”
So I am Bill. I am distractable. That is who I am. That is where I live. Being distractable perhaps enables me to discover insights. But it also is a weakness. If I were like Bryan Caplan, I would spend several years delving deeply into a topic and come out with a compelling book. Maybe somebody needs to find a Sudha to pair with me.
I suspect if you were to post a blog that asked for 10 followers to raise their hands and help you find a Sudha, you’d actually end up with a Sudha+.
I’d volunteer to be one of those 10, post it on LinkedIn, etc. I’m a fellow Bill but in 2 of my last 3 jobs I had a Sudha+.
In the Zack Kanter mold, you, Bill, and Sudha would form a Scrum team. You would self-organize around a shared task list (the backlog), meet briefly each day to quickly share what each of you has-done/are-doing/will-do, check-in your work to a source control system, and have some kind of review process for each check-in to quickly get feedback from the team that is incorporated into a new revision and this loop is repeated until the task is considered complete.
that is the product loop. the question is how to design the customer loop that spreads the generated memes. To be successful, you would try to find the best Arnold, Bill, and Sudha possible and the question then becomes whether there is a potential NumberFour that could improve the team.
One quick question, Arnold (a.k.a., Bill):
What would You (either by yourself, or in concert with “Sudha”) endeavor to produce – that actually made Other People’s Lives Better?
THAT is the only important question to be answered – ever.
(I have no idea how “Bill” would answer that question. I suspect Arnold would answer that question with, “Making use of current technology to publicly put forth ideas and opinions, AND provide the mechanism for shared and public feedback. [at least])
Shayne, can you please read ch2 of Bret Weinstein’s thesis paper Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Emergent Constraints and Their Adaptive Consequences and let me know if you found the topic comprehensible/incomprehensible? I’m wondering if their isn’t something in a mechanism-centric model that is easier for engineer-type brains to grasp.
Okay. Might take a while. But I do “owe you one”, as it were.
(Just offhandedly, the title alone leads me to suspect that I shall be mightily bored from having done so, though.)
RAD:
I have completed your assigned task!
(Plus listening to the Weinstein brothers’ podcast, plus reading your longer comment below, plus reading your blog comment exchange with Daniel Lemire.)
Preface to my response to your question:
My personal experience, accumulated knowledge/expertise, regards the field of study that is Biology, could only, and even in the most gracious terms, be described as: Grossly Impoverished.
[Emphasis on gracious in the above.]
So, to answer your question: I did find Weinstein’s thesis paper topic “comprehensible” – but only with extraordinary supporting assistance from Wiktionary, as well as Weinstein’s context-specific verbal explanations in the podcast with his brother.
(See Preface…, above.)
Also, I did find the subject matter to be not mightily boring, as I’d expected, and indeed somewhat interesting (but also somewhat onerous).
Regards your: “I’m wondering if their [sic] isn’t something in a mechanism-centric model that is easier for engineer-type brains to grasp.”,
my response would be ….
Were you to pose that proposition to either my ex-wife OR my current “main squeeze”, I predict they would both inform you, with absolute unequivocal certainty, that “mechanism-centric models are indeed the ONLY things engineer-type brains are even capable of grasping.
Not being glib with you RAD, this seems to be stuff that is of some passionate interest to you. And that is way cool. I would encourage you to allow that passionate interest to lead you going forward.
Thanks, Shayne, your effort and kind words are greatly appreciated. I do have a passion for biology but I was fully aware when I entered high-school (maybe slightly before) that I was better suited to an engineering path which, during university, quickly forked into a lifelong passion for software. There is something different about my brain but my takeaway from this crude n=3 experiment with you, me, and Daniel Lemire is that there is a special combination of nature and nurture required to make the concepts click.
The concepts click for me in a way that is shared by Bret and Eric Weinstein. Bret and Eric understand the concepts that trigger our engineering brains which is obvious from the first chapter of Bret’s thesis and the two long podcast interviews of Eric I’ve listened to (Joe Rogan and Tom Bilyeu). Bret’s idea doesn’t naturally click for world class biologists (the blank stares Bret received from his colleagues and mentors as he presented his findings as well as the Dawkins/Coyne/Pinker response), it doesn’t click for world class computer science researchers that have a passion for the longevity research involving telomeres (Daniel Lemire), and it doesn’t click (or at least fire the OMG Neurons) of engineers like yourself that have the capacity to apply their mechanism-centric gifts to parallel problem spaces like organizational structure.
I don’t have any biology training beyond high school and I don’t have any chemistry training beyond the introductory university courses that all the engineers I know were required to take. Ironically, I seem to have a deep grasp of genetics, cellular biology, and molecular chemistry. The irony comes from the fact that I can pinpoint the source: my 1991 edition of “The Cartoon Guide to Genetics”. I’ve returned to the 50 or so core pages in the middle of the book every time I’m confused by genetics, such as my confusion over the “DNA is Computer Code” meme that Matt Ridley repeats in his book “Genome”.
During or after my reading of Ridley’s Genome I had an AHA!!! moment when I retreated back to The Cartoon Guide. The revelation seemed so obvious and simple that my confusion was over why I hadn’t heard of it before. A decade later I’m greeted with blank stares or yawns when I discuss it. Bret Weinstein’s telomere insight has the exact same problem. Eric’s anger over the institution of science being dysfunctional (DISC) and the Machiavellian antics of Carol Greider that ultimately led to her 2009 Nobel Prize are side shows; they are important side effects but side effects nonetheless.
The main problem is that it takes a weird confluence of nature and nurture to produce the kind of brain whose “OMG Neurons” fire when presented with the simple description of Bret’s antagonistic tradeoffs idea, such as my response to Daniel Lemire.
Even without the OMG Neuron response to the idea, the implications are massive. Nearly ALL research involving public health is invalidated because of the “Broken Mice”. The empirical evidence behind the safety of drugs and the toxicity of environmental chemicals is ALL wrong if lab mice were involved at any level of the research. This makes the replication crisis in psychology look like an irrelevant blip in terms of impact.
The challenge now is a social one. How to spread the importance of this idea that was trampled on over a decade ago. I now fully understand Eric Weinstein’s anger over the irony that his brother Bret is now famous for the injustice that occurred at Evergreen when his telomere injustice is closer to Galilieo’s historically. E.O. Wilson’s suffering, and Charles Murray’s suffering are historically irrelevant in comparison.
RAD:
Again, let your interests/passions in software and biology lead you. Just don’t let them lead to a point of over-stressing/fracturing any temporal or biblical laws. Bending a few along the way is okay, and probably even encouraged.
On the “other” topic central to all this – the DISC and related phenomena – I can only say “Life isn’t Fair”.
For the more mathematically inclined, Life << Fair.
And for software inclined folks, (Life == Fair) will ALWAYS return False.
One other thing I might add is never let yourself get too impressed with either engineers or engineering.
Stated quite literally, Engineering is the act of co-opting (stealing) ALL of the ideas and discoveries of ALL the other sciences (physics, chemistry, et. al.), and converting those into something that can readily be exchanged in the marketplace for Federal Reserve Coupons.
My work is done. Once I understand a problem or its solution I am perfectly content. I have a powerful new tool to help me understand and navigate the world but I have no ability to influence others. I feel a duty to point out this knowledge to others when it could help them but I don’t think this obligation amounts to more than a link to this comment thread.
Your wisdom is well taken and appreciated. Thanks.
The pleasure of finding things out blog post by Peter Attia (4 min read).
I’m Bill as well. A director of engineering at a large software company once remarked to me “I have two kinds of software teams. One hits all their deadlines, has very low bug counts, and has good relationships with other teams. The other is all over the place for deliveries, other teams are frustrated, can’t commit to dates, and has to completely shut down every few months to get bugs down to a manageable level. All of the actual innovation that makes our products worthwhile comes from the second type.” I fear I’ve taken this too much to heart, as I let myself get distracted very easily. I love puzzles more than I love actually working.
This is good. Thanks for sharing.
A book I’ve mentioned here before and that bears mentioning is _The creating brain_ by Nancy Andreasen, published by Dana Press. It’s a bit old now. If you root around you can find it, methinks.
one of her findings was that highly creative people have trouble excluding irrelevant information and sensory input. Also, they are prone to mood disorders. Not schizophrenic, but tendencies toward bipolar.
It was published by the Dana Foundation. Book may be out of print. Dana Foundation still has a web site.
https://www.dana.org
Thanks for the book suggestion, Charles. I haven’t kept track but I think you are responsible for about half of my paper book inter-branch loans from my public library. The crack opened by the Kindle eReader in 2007 is growing into a chasm; the knowledge captured in books that didn’t get released in digital format is stagnating. Google Books helps find quotes and references but it is useless as a reading platform.
I too found Dagon’s anecdote insightful, and your book reference may explain the underlying mechanism, but the Engineering Director’s heuristic feels like an anachronism to me. An anachronism that I’ve seen and lived through but of a time when large code bases were saved in zip files and managers demanded strict MS Project tracking under threat of dismissal. Better tools and techniques are hiding these mental bugs/features.
It’s always hard to know what to read next. Glad I could suggest some good titles.
For some of us, there’s always one more thing we want to read. It helps keep life interesting
Disenchantment
by Emily Dickinson
It dropped so low in my regard
I heard it hit the ground,
And go to pieces on the stones
At bottom of my mind;
Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less
Than I reviled myself
For entertaining plated wares
Upon my silver shelf
I am reminded of Dr Kling’s previous exhortations regarding social media: if you don’t like Facebook, build your own platform. Similarly with economics. Don’t like whatever it is that mainstream economics is trying to pass itself off as, then make your own. A catchy name for what Dr Kling stands for might be something like “dynamic sociology” or “humane economics” or “holistic commercial analysis”?? I dunno. There does seem to be a paucity of original thought in mainstream economics these days. It has become less of a science and motif a practice like accounting. Utterly predictable. Perhaps the distraction is a healthy reaction.
All of Our Mice Are Broken: The Greatest Story Every Told
Oh my God, I just finished listening to the Eric Weinstein The Portal podcast Ep #19 where Eric interviews his brother Bret. I had no idea I had accidentally stumbled upon such an incredible story when I read Bret Weinstein’s thesis paper through one of the reference links on Bret’s Wikipedia page. The DISC story is interesting, the “Research Science Industrial Complex” to give it a “*-Industrial-Complex” label, but I’m less interested in the politics and more fascinated with how and why people accept counter-intuitive new ideas like The Nurture Assumption and now Bret Weinstein’s “lab mouse telomere controversy” which effectively throws aways decades of medical research involving lab mice.
Today was the first time I felt like leaving blog comments wasn’t a goofy waste of my time because I now have a record of a natural experiment that occurred between two relatively intelligent people assessing a ground-breaking science paper before it was recognized as being important.
A computer science professor, Daniel Lemire, posted a list of science links on his blog and I thought the link to a Nature paper about mice and telomere length was odd given what I had recently absorbed from a reading of Bret’s paper. My comment about Weinstein’s thesis provided a link and a one line description of the paper. The paper had been on my mind since I had read it and its predictive power seemed obvious to me not only for evolution and biology but my own personal long-term plan for cancer detection as I age.
So first of all, I’m proud of my interpretation of the paper given that it is well outside my wheelhouse. More importantly, what on earth accounts for Daniel Lemire’s interpretation of the paper, which he thoughtfully read after his initial dismissal? Lemire is a smart cookie, I respect his computer science work immensely. He wasn’t being flippant, he understands the science even though its not his field and he has criticized the peer reviewed journal system which he participates in.
I think there is something about making a prediction upfront that makes people skeptical of any counter evidence they subsequently find. Without any modesty, I am sure that Lemire ranks higher in any quantitative measure of intelligence and/or relevant experience compared to myself. I think the difference in interpretation is purely a social function though I don’t understand how this mechanism works.
Anyway, this is way more important than the Charles Murray and Judith Rich Harris controversies and, as they say in the podcast, real lives are at stake.
Corollary question for Arnold Kling: why did you focus on the DISC meme instead of the implications of the Bret Weinstein’s thesis?
I really like Specialization and Trade, and think it is almost catchy.
BUT …
how to apply its insights to guide monetary policy?
or fiscal policy?
or the work of any particular organization?
A huge part of the power of any powerful idea is the ability to use the idea, it’s in the implementation.
Specialization and Trade seems like “Truth” to me, understanding what happened. And even being ready to see what is happening and what will soon happen. But how to use it? to make money with it? to achieve some policy objective? to justify some political policy that will have good GNP factory output increases?
Practice your one-minute and five-minute summaries of S&T (and give up on the PSST non-catchy, tho more accurate, acronym). Develop your “elevator pitch” on why S&T is more insightful than most other micro / macro that will be taught. Write that down.
S&T is in need of disciples. These usually come from students who are inspired.
+1
“Business problems posed by the internet.” You frequently lament not being more influential. I suspect this is because you are not relentlessly promoting yourself on Twitter. So let’s put that to music! A parody of “You Ought to Be in Pictures.”
You oughta be on Twitter,
You’re wonderful to see,
You oughta be on Twitter,
Oh what a hit you would be!
Your voice would thrill a nation,
Your face would be adored,
You’d make a great sensation
with wealth and fame your reward;
And if you should Tweet the way you talk,
When we’re alone,
You’d make ev’ry girl and man
A fan worshiping at your throne.
You oughta shine as brightly
As Jupiter and Mars;
You oughta be on Twitter,
My star of stars.