Comments on: Swinging for the Fences when You Should Bunt

By: dearieme

dearieme — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:26:07 +0000

Geniuses don’t do Economics.

By: dearieme

dearieme — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:26:06 +0000

Geniuses don’t do Economics.

By: Barkley Rosser

Barkley Rosser — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:30:51 +0000

Following more directly on Stuart, sometimes the big nuggets are serendipitous, a result of a sideshow to a main research effort, although the most dramatic cases tend to be more purely empirical, such as the discovery of penicillin.

By: David J. Balan

David J. Balan — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 14:54:52 +0000

Stuart, I guess I am implicitly assuming that anyone who has gotten through the necessary training can actually do the non-genius sized nuggets, so it doesn’t matter whether or not failure there could be easily obscured. If you accept that failure can be obscured in the genius-sized nuggets, and you are prepared to accept as given that prestige will still attach to attempts of unknown success to do them (which does seem to be the case), then I think my point holds. This creates a bias in the allocation of talent, and it muddies the waters. What I’m not sure about is whether it introduces any systematic bias in economic results.

Stuart and Meredith,
You are right that my proposed division into geniuses and non-geniuses is way too pat and misses a lot. But I think it does serve to make my point.

By: Meredith

Meredith — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 17:20:19 +0000

Alan: There's a big payoff in academic legal circles for inventing whole systems from scratch. I certainly agree that there's a big payoff, but I think it's a misnomer to say that law professors "invent" whole systems from scratch. Rather, we seem to crib whole systems from existing liberal arts and science fields. (See, e.g., Seidman, Tushnet, Posner, Sunstein.) The problem -- at least in America -- ultimately seems to stem from the admissions, grading, and academic hiring criteria. But that's a different discussion for a different time.

By: Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 16:59:43 +0000

If you think it’s bad in empirical economics, you ought to look at law. There’s a big payoff in academic legal circles for inventing whole systems from scratch. Actually mastering a tough field tends to get you labeled as “nuts and bolts.” Some (certainly not all, but quite a few) of the “big names” among academic lawyers are people I wouldn’t trust to draft a simple will. I know one lawyer whose law firm fired him for incompetence and who then went into academe and wrote ambitious but nonsensical papers. His career aver since has been very successful.

By: Meredith

Meredith — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:17:51 +0000

Genius appears to be more about creativity than the “size of the nugget.” Like the rest of us, most of them start off with one question: it just turns out that the question’s solution is far more extensive than they had originally anticipated.

By: Stuart Armstrong

Stuart Armstrong — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 11:39:13 +0000

It would tend to be a bias towards studies where failure can be obscured more easily. Whether those will be simpler or harder models… well we had inconclusive fun with that here.

Also, figuring out if something is a genius size nugget can only be done in retrospect – once Einstein has announced General Relativity and we look at all the other endevours in the field and realise how far off they were,

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:47:56 +0000

There is error in the evaluation of success. Failure can look like success and success can look like failure. I don’t yet see that this produces an overall bias to try problems that are too hard.

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 03:42:13 +0000

The other problem is figuring out if you actually are a genius or not.