Same here. I did notice what I think was an actual error on someone's part, there was a chart in the files comparing black to white IQ distributions, and well, just look at it:
Me too. I first assumced it was an OCR error, then remembered they were emails and wouldn't need to go through OCR. Then I thought that the US Government is exactly the kind of place to print out millions of emails only to scan them back in again.
The Bunkers. My father told me the story many times as a child and he warned me sternly never to buy Silver. There's always more Silver he said. People will be dredging it out of old cupboards.
This is exactly how I felt when studying management as part of ostensibly an Engineering / Econ / Management degree.
When you added it up, most of the hard parts were Engineering, and a bit Econ. You would really struggle to work through tough questions in engineering, spend a lot of time on economic theory, and then read the management stuff like you were reading a newspaper.
Management you could spot a mile away as being soft. There's certainly some interesting ideas, but even as students we could smell it was lacking something. It's just a bit too much like a History Channel documentary. Entertaining, certainly, but it felt like false enlightenment.
Econ is the only social science that isn't completely bogus. The replication rate isn't too bad, even though it is still worse than STEM of course.
Everything else is basically like rolling a dice or even worse. Special mention to "pedagogy," which manages to be systematically worse than random; in other words, they only produce bullshit and not much else.
I started my career in derivatives. Mostly vanilla, but I did have a look in the exotics.
Intellectually, it's interesting when you start. There's all these weird payoffs that you are introduced to, and it feels like a game.
The thing is, there's a limit to how exotic things can get. People have already figured out how to price most of the things you can imagine, including all the things that customers normally ask for. Most of the day goes on looking after your hedges, basically implementing the model.
It's like a zoo. When you arrive there's a bunch of different, interesting animals. After a while, you've met them all. There's no new animals, just variations of existing ones.
However the thing that is really an issue is how the business works. Over time I came to the conclusion that the quants in the derivs space are really secondary to the salespeople. How important is the quant who can get the price right to within 1%, when the sales guy can talk the customer into overpaying by 5%? Sometimes it feels like the customer is not even shopping the structure around at all, he just feels comfortable with his sales guy and is willing to hand over a few million bucks of customer money with barely any thought.
This matches my experiences as a non-quant, but havin done support work for quite a few of them. You can feel the novelty slough off of them as they get burned down into realizing they're just fitting curves.
Spotting fish who you can overcharge is not really a sustainable business model. You can do it once but your colleagues will find out, move to a competitor, and next time they'll rip them off a bit less than you did and you'll have to rip them off less than that.
There is, eventually, a shortage of dumb money. The sustainable way of making money involves competition, and this involves knowing the "right" price within a tight tolerance.
No, the feedback loop isn't closed. The fish customer just keeps handing his spread to his favourite sales guy.
I've witnesses this several times, some trader always uses the same relationship, irrespective of cost. I've seen this both in terms of friends from a long time ago helping each other, family, or backhanders.
And so the real winner is that sales guy. I've known people climb to the very top of well known institutions on the back of relationships with just one hedge fund.
What you're describing is a sort of ideal market from an economics textbook.
The situation you are describing definitely happens, people have their mates they like working with and a single relationship can make a whole career.
Normally though, such relationships do not involve the sales person charging significantly above market rates. The client usually has very strong incentives to reduce costs. While a single salesperson might build a career on a chummy relationship this isn't a sustainable approach for an entire firm to take because it is too unusual. The majority of the revenue is coming from client/sales relationships where the client is at least somewhat price sensitive and sufficiently savvy to get more than one quote.
It seems the criticism is indeed Berkson's Paradox, but the example is different to the canonical example of Berkson's paradox.
In the canonical example, you have uncorrelated attributes, eg skill and attractiveness in actors, forming a round scatter plot with no correlation. Selecting a subpopulation of top actors who are either skilled or attractive, you get a negative correlation. You can visualize this as chopping the top-right of the round scatter plot off: the chopped off piece is oriented in roughly a line of negative correlation.
In this example, if you look in the linked paper inside the post by Dimakis, there is a positively correlated scatter plot: You can tell the shape is correlated positively between youth and adult performance. But in this case, if you condition on the extremes of performance, you end up selecting a cloud of points that has flat to slight negative correlation.
Correlated attributes can still lead to the paradox, so long as the error measured parallel to the cutoff line (the "fuzziness" of the correlation) is greater than the slope of the cutoff line. Here are a couple cartoons to demonstrate. Denote each datapoint with I or E, depending on whether it's included or excluded in the region x + y > z.
I have similar observations. The time saved is things like going to some library I wrote to find the exact order of parameters, or looking up some API on the internet and adjusting my code to it. Inevitably if I did that the old way, I would screw up something trivial and get annoyed.
I rarely let it run for over 10 minutes unattended, but the benefits are not just pure time.
Being able to change the code without getting bogged down allows you to try more things. If I have to wait half an hour between iterations, I'm going to run into bedtime quite fast.
On top of this, I'm finding that the thing that takes the deepest attention is often, amazingly, trivial things. Fiddling with a regex takes attention, but it doesn't often decide the success of the project.
By contrast, the actual work, which is making technical decisions, is something I can do without concentrating in the same way. It's strange that the higher value thing feels less stressful.
Put these together and I'm more productive. I can string together a bunch of little things, and not have to be at my sharpest. Work can be scheduled for whenever, which means days are more flexible. More gets done, with less attention.
I dunno, I went to a high school reunion last year, and a dude seemed to know people's phone numbers from 30 years ago.
If he could remember that sort of thing, I can believe there are people who can remember steps of a proof, which is a much less random thing that you can feel your way around, given a few queues from memory.
Plus, realistically, how closely does an examiner read a proof? They have a stack of dozens of almost the same thing, I bet they get pretty tired of it and use a heuristic.
I think many people who grew up before cell phones remember phone numbers from the past. I just thought about it and can list the phone numbers of 3 houses that were on my childhood street in the early 2000s + another 5 that were friends in the area. I remember at least a handful of cell phone numbers from the mid to late 2000s as friends started to get those; some of them are still current. On the other hand, I don't know the number of anyone I've met in the last 15 years besides my wife, and haven't tried to.
Yes, I have. I do it too, even some basic functions, I would look up on SO.
You really just need to know that there's a way to open files in C.
I don't think you can reach any sort of scale of breadth or depth if you try to memorize things. Programmers have to glue together a million things, it's just not realistic for them to know all the details of all of them.
It's unfortunate for the guy who has memorized all of K&R, but we have tools now to bring us these details based on some keywords, and we should use them.
I, too, was reading about the new Epstein files, wondering what text artifact was causing things to look like that.
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