Herman Chernoff used to do that too; also, some puzzlement over another’s puzzlement over another’s preferences

Steven Levitt writes:.

Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar!

Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . . . maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized.

P.S. Levitt also writes:

The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences.

To get meta here for a moment . . . just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve,

It’s obvious, no? Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determines much of monetary policy; and by being on the board, Diamond would have a chance to influence that policy. Where’s the puzzlement?

Now that I’ve explained Diamond to Levitt, perhaps someone can explain Levitt to me. . .

P.P.S. Someone suggested to me that Levitt’s puzzlement above is due to his (Levitt’s) disdain for macro, which is basically all the Fed does. But I don’t think that’s quite right: Levitt liked macro when his colleague Casey Mulligan was arguing (in October, 2008!) that “things are just not that bad” in the economy.

8 thoughts on “Herman Chernoff used to do that too; also, some puzzlement over another’s puzzlement over another’s preferences

  1. Going from academia to work in Washington is supposed to be personally unpleasant. You can't see your family, have no free time, can't say what you really think, are personally denigrated by the media, and often take a major pay cut.

  2. James:

    1. He's 70 years old, so the family thing shouldn't be such a big deal. I don't know anything about Diamond's personal life, but it wouldn't be so hard for him to get back to Boston to see the grandchildren, if that's an issue.

    2. By Levitt's testimony, the guy's a workaholic, so "no free time" shouldn't be a problem either.

    3. "Can't say what you really think . . . are personally denigrated by the media": Maybe. But not such a big price to pay to have some impact on macroeconomic policy, I'd think–especially for someone who's been studying the topic all his professional life.

    4. They guy just got a financial windfall, not to mention that they pay pretty well at MIT. Unless Diamond has a William Bennett-sized habit, he probably has enough socked away in savings that the pay doesn't matter.

    Beyond all this, Levitt wrote, "why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve?" As if it's some kind of mystery why a person who studies macroeconomics would want to influence macroeconomic policy. I remain puzzled by the puzzlement.

  3. I assume he is saying that, since we don't understand people preferences [and assuming somehows monetary policy is about people's preference) Diamond will probably do a terrible job at FED. This means that he will risk his reputation as a smart guy at the Fed.

  4. More experienced people don't need much of a cue to ask hard questions, because they know where the hard questions are. I remember Rich Thomason, who eventually hired me as a post-doc, asking me really hard and relevant questions after about three minutes into my explanation of my dissertation. And there I was thinking I'd discovered how hard some of these problems were.

    Dana Scott, an ACM Turing Award winner, would sometimes fall asleep and then wake up to ask really hard questions. Like at my CMU job talk.

  5. From a sample of one – an older lab head that does the same thing – here's my take on their secret:

    They read stuff beforehand.

    What he used to do (still does I assume) is spend fifteen-twenty minutes to look up and browse through the recent publications of any visitor. The primary reason seems to be to determine whether it is someone they would want to talk to separately, introduce a student or junior colleague to, or perhaps even see if there's potential for a collaboration or similar.

    But as a side effect, when the seminar rolls around they know what it's going to be about, and they've had a day or two already to mull over what the visitor is doing, and how it relates to other research. And once it's clear that the seminar isn't going to feature any major surprises they can safely go to sleep, knowing that they're not missing a thing. They aren't going to ask any superficial questions as they've figured them out by themselves already.

  6. Janne – similarily when you invite someone to give talks in your "towne" you can seed good questions by giving seminars on thier topic for graduate students and faculty.

    Also – as Mike West once pointed out to me – this is sometimes faked to enhance one's reputation of being brillianter than others.

    K?

  7. The message is quite simple: 1) economists are so smart that they can make extremely intelligent comments even when they don't pay attention to the lecture (and, presumable, in general they also don't have to make big efforts to learn things ) ; 2) economist are so important, such smart and busy persons, that even a *high* level position in the government of the only world superpower is not much for them; 3) And for us, poor and limited people, nothing much is left but respect them.

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