Archive for category crosspost
False advertising
What do you do if a company makes some puzzling claims on their website? Well, you ask them about it. I recently did this for a well-known investment house in South Africa. You can read about it in this blog post from my other blog J delta rho. Here is an extract:
I recently ventured into a bit of consumer activism and want to relate the experience – not to blow my own trumpet, but to encourage others to be more vigilant. I was looking at the webpage of a well-respected investment house in South Africa last year and read about their investment approach. Buried in this “investment philosophy” was the following sentence:
The word “pragmatic” refers to the Charles Peirce School of investment philosophy, which advocates taking a practical approach to matters with reference to historical events.
I found this rather interesting – I had never heard of the “Charles Peirce School” and I immediately googled it… read more here
Don’t spot the pattern
If I write 2 then 4 then 6, then we feel good because we know that next comes 8. We can foresee it. We are not in the hands of destiny. Unfortunately, however, this has nothing to do with truth. – Arthur Seldom, The Oxford Murders (movie)
If you watched the movie The Oxford Murders then you’ll know of the futility of trying to guess the next number in a sequence. On my blog J delta rho I have placed a little rant about asking people to spot patterns. Here are the first few lines:
I remember getting questions at school of the form “which number comes next?” At the time I thought these questions were perfectly normal. I now think they are nonsensical. As such it troubles me to see similar questions (with diagrams rather than numbers) are being used in psychometric assessments.
Read more here.
Stop confusing clever with lucky
Here is an excerpt from a post on my other blog, J delta rho where I decry the all too common practice of assuming people who made money in the stock market were somehow remarkable, rather than just extremely lucky.
I get very annoyed when I see idiotic journalism, such as this article (admittedly Business Insider does not exactly maintain high standards of journalism, but in this case they just copied CNBC). To recap: one 22-year old kid put all his savings into Tesla shares (and later options on Tesla shares) and today has made quite a hefty profit. But when his friends told him he was crazy, they were right.
read more here.
Statistical intuition fails
Has your intuition ever failed you? Mine sometimes has (and I call myself a mathematician). In this post from my blog J delta rho I relate one such case and what it means for traders.
I am ashamed to say that my statistical intuition has failed me. I was doing some brainteasers and came across this one here :
In a country in which people only want boys every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
read more here.
Self-critique
Here is an extract from a post on my blog J delta rho about the importance of being self-critical in academia. This is, of course, also important in life. It is not enough for others to acknowledge your faults, you must acknowledge them for yourself and actively seek them out.
I recently finished my masters thesis and I would now like to do something that most people never do. I am going to critique my work. I believe that being self-critical is essential not only in research, but in life in general. In research it is necessary to further the truth. It is not enough that others are critical of you (though it is necessary). You must be critical of yourself – only then will you be willing to remedy your flaws, change your convictions and pursue truth and goodness rather than your own prejudiced agenda.
Read more of this post on my other blog, J delta rho, here….
Don’t trust research, not even your own
The more research I do (and I have not done much) the less I trust other research, and the less I trust my own. When you read a paper in finance you will invariably find significant results that support the author’s conclusions. When I run regressions, my results are weak, sometimes contradicting my hypothesis sometimes confirming it.
Read more of this post on my other blog, J delta rho, here….
The anonymous referee
Here is another post from my other blog, more on academia, this time peer review (don’t worry I will have some more regular meditations soon):
In academic articles, you sometimes come across a paragraph that makes no sense (even on a second or third reading). Very often you will find, attached to this paragraph, a footnote, which says something like the following…. read more
Humble academics
Here is an extract from the latest post on my other blog, which is about maths, probability and finance:
“I’ve been reading through (the introductions) of very many articles in finance these past two weeks. The more I read, the more I realise that in finance the truth is a very murky prospect.” Read more…
Meditations of Lambchop 