Monthly Shorts 6/21
Mathematics
Max Dama on Automated Trading is the best introduction to the topic I have seen. Well-written and correct in every detail I know. If you’re at all interested in becoming a quant, or just like fun brainteasers, I recommend reading it.
So, one of the reasons automated trading is appealing is that it makes a lot of sense. Non-automated trading…doesn’t, always. If you’re familiar with GME diamond hands to the moon, but haven’t been totally following AMC, this is a good piece to catch up with.
Bard is a good person, and wrote an excellent post on Dungeons and Dragons and Mathematics. Funny anecdotes and impassioned storytelling. Any summary doesn’t do it justice, but the short pitch is that if you think removing mathematics from a subject to make it more accessible is an obvious justice issue, Bard has a good response.
As usual, a priming study fails to replicate. There’s a special bonus fact today, though: that failure to replicate is only expected to decrease future citations by 12%.
Politics
I managed to find a study, published this century, that I think should not have been done (and that the three IRBs that signed off on it must have been too permissive to allow)! https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f126621.pdf had researchers pay students about $40 USD to upload information that could only be obtained by going to a protest march. In Hong Kong, back when the tensions were very live and attendance could have resulted in students being jailed or their families subject to pressure. And, incidentally, they were effectively paying students for political participation (I find their denial on the subject a little silly, observers count bodies in the area unless they're actively opposed in some visible way). This has, of course, become propaganda for the CCP.
In general, when there is too much X getting past filter Y (say, thieves not getting barked at by your guard dog), your societal alternatives are to either improve the quality of your filter (maybe you need a new guard dog that can see?) or tilt the error ratio of your filter (increase how likely your dog barks at all, which will lead to getting woken up by false alarms more often). If IRBs allowed a large number of bad studies, that would be evidence that they were an incompetent filter. But as there are almost no bad studies allowed, I instead think that they’re a wildly over-zealous filter (this is one study out of thousands, promoted to my attention via algorithms specifically because it was ethically unacceptable). Thankfully, turning a dial is much easier than improving quality.
Eleanor Roosevelt had sexual and romantic relationships with women, plausibly including Amelia Earhart (how is history forgotten, and how is it remembered?)
A fascinating profile in Yashar Ali, worth reading for insights on how the ultra-wealthy relate, the shape of the modern media, and the continuing importance of personal relationships.
The Bad Cop is worth a mention, though every post on Graham Factor is good. It talks through what happened that resulted in a cop doing something unacceptable, and humanizes the story in a way that doesn’t make anyone look like a saint or an irredeemable sinner. Graham Factor is clearly opinionated, but it’s the only clearly opinionated pro-cop place I can go. Though I am very suspicious of the concluding argument:
I never walked into work, looked at a co-worker, and thought: “Ah, there’s the Bad Cop.” There are just cops, who are people with all the problems that people tend to have, trying to do a difficult job and sometimes failing in really, really ugly ways.
From the perspective of citizens, there are absolutely bad cops: cops with a long history of violence and citizen complaints, and a small number of cops seem to generate a decent fraction of complaints.
Kindness to Kin is a short story about game theory, altruism, and first contact. If you’re the crying sort, you might. I do not think any other story I have read in at least six months is as likely to cause such crying.
Practical: Things You’re Allowed To Do reminded me of something that I am allowed to do. Reminders like this to examine your life, think about it, and remember that some problems are just solvable are weirdly valuable for me.
P.S.
Apologies for the short release this month: I took two weeks of vacation. Likely the only two weeks I will take during my entire PhD program. Most of my “vacations” actually consist of me going somewhere and continuing to work a full-time, or close to full-time, schedule, while going out in the evenings, living with friends, and otherwise benefitting from wherever I am staying and my lower standards on various axes than I would tolerate at home. But this was a real one, with sun and wind and waves.