Mathiness

I think Paul Romer, economics Nobel laureate, coined this term in 2015<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aeaweb.org&#x2F;articles?id=10.1257&#x2F;aer.p20151066" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aeaweb.org&#x2F;articles?id=10.1257&#x2F;aer.p20151066</a><p>“ Mathiness lets academic politics masquerade as science. Like mathematical theory, mathiness uses a mixture of words and symbols, but instead of making tight links, it leaves ample room for slippage between statements in the languages of words as opposed to symbols, and between statements with theoretical as opposed to empirical content. Because it is difficult to distinguish machines from mathematical theory, the market for lemons tells us that the market for mathematical theory might collapse, leaving only machines as entertainment that is worth little but cheap to produce.”

&gt; In Calling Bullshit, the authors give the example of the Virginia Mason Quality Equation Q = [Ax(O+S)÷W] (Quality equals Appropriateness times the sum of Outcomes and Service divided by Waste), a formula used for improving operations management in healthcare.<p>I think it&#x27;s best to think of this as an overextended metaphor, rather than a clumsy attempt to provide a rigorous relationship. The message to take away from this &#x27;equation&#x27; is:<p>* more appropriateness means more quality; * better outcomes means more quality; * better service means more quality; * less waste means more quality.<p>It&#x27;s a small minority of people who give a shit about mathematics. The children who used to whine about, &#x27;When are we every going to use this?&#x27; grow up to be adults who complain about not having learnt about how to complete their tax returns at school.<p>The equation above is an <i>aide de memoire</i> for people managing healthcare facilities. It&#x27;s irrelevant to people who understand that it&#x27;s an abuse of mathematical ideas.<p>The &#x27;Fixing mathiness&#x27; section, however, is very good. This article is from a survey company, so this is about increasing the validity of the results you get from their product, but it speaks to the problem of inappropriate statistical methods being used to manufacture signals from noise.

so all of economics, basically.<p>a mitigating argument for mathiness is that we use math to describe shapes and relationships we can&#x27;t physically see, and how do you contruct an analogy for a dynamic between factors (or narrative elements) without using changing quantities?<p>Is the analogy a useful abstraction, or does it provide consistency with lower or higher levels of abstraction, or have external consistency with the rest of maths? Probably not, but as an application that is sufficient for its purposes, some mathiness enables people to separate the things they talk about from just their personal animal interests.<p>Sure, some people want more from the math, and economics is a great gateway to math because it&#x27;s probably one of the most sophiticated systems of bullshit ouside string theory, and it provokes the desire for rigour.<p>Math isn&#x27;t evidence, it&#x27;s the lens, and you can reject mathiness in anything by just declining to accept that lens.

I always often feel this way about folks who give probability based estimates of their certainty, instead of just describing their level of certainty with human language. Some caveats for things like 99%, which can be said in a way that makes it clear that it is actually just being used as and expression.<p>A funny way to describe 95% certainty, among a certain type of nerd at least, is a “critical failure.” IMO it is a nice way of expressing the fact that you’d be very surprised to be wrong, but then, D&amp;D has a whole mechanic about 1-in-20 events happening occasionally. All without any numbers.

T-Shirt sizes?<p>&gt; Without a numerical value, such estimates cannot be misused easily in mathematical formulas.<p>Those units will still be misused and even abused. &quot;What does an M mean in days?&quot;, you&#x27;ll be asked. And voila, there&#x27;s a number. And, if there&#x27;s a number there&#x27;s some equation in which it&#x27;ll be used.

Agree with the underlying thesis of the post, but wonder if their criteria suffers the same issues as the thing they are being critical of.<p>I wonder what the author would think of the Drake Equation or quantum mechanic&#x27;s superposition, as they seem to check a good deal of these boxes but are widely regarded.

This makes me wonder if there is some useful way to apply lattice theory to software development estimation. Essentially, take the tasks and compose a lattice using a “definitely harder than” relation. While we are observably bad at predicting just how hard a task is, I believe we can do a much better job of answering is A definitely harder than B with a yes or no. And if we can’t then we provide no answer while building the lattice.<p>And then, well I have no idea. I’d have to build some examples and play with them.

&gt; In Calling Bullshit, the authors give the example of the Virginia Mason Quality Equation Q = [Ax(O+S)÷W]<p>I read somewhere (maybe in Thinking, Fast and Slow?), that formulas like this can actually be surprisingly effective, even though the units don’t make sense, because they encode an intuition but prevent you from putting your finger on the scale when applying it, by mixing in other biases. IIRC, the studies on this found that trying to tune these formulas by adding in weights tended to make them worse, which is especially surprising.<p>I’ll have to see if I can dig up the reference on this.

This post essentially described Pincipal Component Analysis in its entirety.<p>Trying to find eigencomponents in a mixing of incompatible units means that your result is completely arbitrary to the scale factor of your units.<p>And &quot;fixing&quot; the dimensionality by choosing an arbitrary normalization factor only further increases its mathiness factor.

Adding quantities of wildly different units is totally unsound [1].<p>______________<p>[1] except in machine learning

Sophisticated marketing annd political campaigns include everything from bikini clad women to academic papers.<p>Using mathematical language is always a rhetorical choice to suggest precision and authority.

so much of economics is just mathiness

E = mc²+AI<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1663393508240261122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;status&#x2F;1663393508240261122</a>

Mathiness + AI

I partially attribute this issue to this paper from 2012:<p>&quot;The abstract that included the meaningless mathematics tended to be judged of higher quality. However, this “nonsense math effect” was not found among participants with degrees in mathematics, science, technology or medicine.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;journals&#x2F;judgment-and-decision-making&#x2F;article&#x2F;nonsense-math-effect&#x2F;E1098F55C74B3C77E74060428F7759A0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;journals&#x2F;judgment-and-decisio...</a>

unblock everything

What is bullshit is the attempt to appropriate a useful neutral adjective to mean more than it does. Mathy is just mathy. Physics is more mathy than psychology. Too mathy can be bad, sure.