Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen to cover for crypto scams (his list of “falls in status” includes silly items such as “Mrs. Jellyby,” bizarre items such as “Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30,” and “Venture capital,” but, oddly enough, not “Crypto” itself) made me think that smart people are overrated. Let me put it this way: if you’re a smart astrologer, you’re still not gonna be able to do “real” astrology, which doesn’t exist. To say it slightly differently: it’s easy to promise things, especially if you have a good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can’t deliver. It doesn’t matter how smart James Watson’s friend was; he didn’t have that promised cancer cure in two years.
As the saying goes: Saying it don’t make it so. I could go around telling the world I had a solution to all the problems of MRP, and some people might believe me for awhile—but I don’t have such a solution.
I can see how Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about.
All this got me thinking: in what fields of endeavor does it matter that you’re just B.S.-ing, and in what fields can you get away with it?
Sports: Chess cheating aside, if you don’t got it, you don’t got it. Public relations can get you endorsement contracts but not the coveted W. Yes, you can get lucky, but at the highest levels, only the best players can get lucky enough to win.
Science: You can have a successful scientific career based on a deft combination of B.S., promotion, and academic politics—just ask Trofim Lysenko, or Robert Sternberg—but you won’t be producing successful science. That said, you can do good science even with terrible theories: as I like to say, often the house is stronger than its foundations. I’ve heard that Isaac Newton learned a few real things even while trying in vain to convert lead into gold, and, at a much lower level, my colleagues and I have had spinoff successes from some of our overly-ambitious statistical failures.
Literature: Here, being smart, or inspired, will do the trick. Consider Philip K. Dick, who believed all sorts of weird things which he transmuted into wonderful literature.
Finance: This one’s somewhere in between. With a good line of B.S. you can do well for a long time, even until the end of your life (for example, Jack Welch); other times you’ll get caught out, as with the recent crypto scandal.
Often I think of this great line that Craig delivered to Phil one day in high school. They were arguing about something, and Craig concluded with, “You may be winning the argument, but that doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means you’re better at arguing.”
That was a good point. A good debater can persuade with a bad position. That doesn’t suddenly make the position correct. And sometimes it can be a bad thing to be too good a debater, or to be too insulated—personally or financially—from people who can present the opposite view. As discussed above, it depends on what field you’re working in.
It’s possible Andrew missed an opportunity here, since Cowen’s field, economics is clearly one in which B.S.ers can thrive.
For instance, William Nordhaus won a Nobel equivalent for modelling that would fail in undergrad physics:
see
“Whatever economists are up to, it isn’t like physics modeling.”
https://undark.org/2021/11/11/its-time-we-stop-listening-to-economists-on-climate-change/
Nordhaus’s “logic” & curve-fitting has generated “spectacularly stupid projections”
https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/bad-math-is-steering-us-toward-climate-catastrophe
At the risk of sounding cynical, I think politics is an area where you thrive on B.S. alone. Another one is sales. Hmmm….maybe they are not unrelated?
Politics is a little different because by definition it is a kind of shared fiction.
As David Graeber puts it
There is currently in Democratic systems a loose coupling to policy, but it is loose and is by no means inherent. There’s a long history of people persuading by a supposed divine right to rule.
Even in a BS heavy field like, say, finance, returns are coupled to the discounted future cash flows of an asset. If everyone in the world undervalues an asset, you can buy it at a discount. Even if they never change their minds, you’ll profit on the dividends or buybacks. Of course, these are in the end contracts enforced by law and therefore politics.
The use of “everyone in the world” does not make for a meaningful argument.
The point is that no matter how many people you convince you can breathe underwater, it is still a false statement. Whereas there is a finite number of people you have to convince to actually be king.
Do you disagree that a critical mass of people believing you are the king does, by definition, make you the king?
“too insulated—personally or financially—from people who can present the opposite view”
People who present the opposite view is one thing, it’s certainly good to have some kind of force to push against to test your ideas. But I think the point here is that if your field primarily impacts people and ideas (debate, politics, literature, finance, some kinds of science) then you can go very far on BS, but if your field interacts with the physical world (sports, engineering, other kinds of science) BS doesn’t help you much at all. Physics doesn’t care about your charm.
Physics doesn’t care about your charm…
…unless you’re a quark!
For the win!
+1
This whole thing reminds me of the first half of Plato’s Gorgias. Any field where persuasion can be used to thrive will allow one to succeed on BS alone. Some classic examples that come to mind are Marketing, Journalism, Blogging, Consulting, etc. Really though at the top of any field there is room for outsized rewards due to BS alone. No one can make it into the NBA without a certain level of ability/skill but if you’re currently an NBA player and you can persuade LeBron James there’s a chance the Lakers will throw you a big bag of money to play for them. Similarly I imagine if you don’t have the ability you’ll quickly be kicked out of a Michelin Star kitchen, but if you’re already a top chef people will throw some money your way even if your skills have atrophied.
I wonder if “resting on one’s laurels” is distinct from or a special case of B.S.
“Any field where persuasion can be used to thrive will allow one to succeed on BS alone.”
There is no field that does not rest on a certain amount of persuasion. But it does not follow that one can succeed on BS alone.
And one person’s BS is another’s truth. Kendi is thriving as an academic and public “intellectual”, even though he’s peddling unadulterated cant.
I suppose this is all linked to both the credulity and the investedness of the audience. I think you can get quite far in science with B.S. and disingenuity because the stats/philosophy literacy is quite low in many areas, and because many established people are heavily invested in the status quo (e.g. thoughtless NHST, unrepresentative samples, etc.)
Tyler is very smart, but – of course – that doesn’t mean he is always right.
I generally agree with you on Finance, but it’s a pretty big field. We can debate about luck vs. skill, but money being on the line helps provide a barometer for measurement. When you’re talking insurance, banking, or asset management, losing money will eventually tell you when you’re wrong. That’s not to say that some people can attract a lot of investors and earn big fees in spite of performance that isn’t strong enough to justify the fees, but it’s a competitive industry and the unskillful tend to lose market share over time.
If money isn’t on the line, then it’s harder to figure out what the barometer is. For instance, a sell-side strategist might be wrong 9 times out of 10, but people may still pay for his research if he is right 1 time out of 10 when no one else is right. That model tends to be more prone to BS. But even then, the sell-side strategist is usually employed by a brokerage firm who has money on the line and if people don’t value the strategist’s opinion, then they will do less trading with the firm (typically). So money is on the line, but it’s a bundle of decisions and the relationship isn’t quite as strong as for the insurance company, bank, or asset manager.
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine often points out that the skill in running a hedge fund is not knowing how to make financial returns at the hedge fund…. it’s convincing people to invest in the fund and not withdraw money from the fund. Financial returns are one component of the argument hedge fund managers have, of course, but they are only one component of the gestalt of hedge fund investing. The great managers (in terms of their personal enrichment) are the ones who can convince people to stay in the fund even when returns are weak.
boy, if that blogpost was the only thing i’d read from him, i’d take serious issue with the “very smart” part
“smart people are overrated”
Ha! That’s why we have science in the first place! Smart people are wrong a lot, and they make a lot of bad mistakes.
But that’s the least of our problems. Our biggest problem is that dumb people are **far** more overrated than smart people, there are **far** more of them, and right now they’re working hard every day to ensure dumbness is safe from criticism and incompetence is protected from just rewards. Let’s get rid of uni entrance exams! Let’s get rid of grades! Smart people don’t do any better than dumb people in society! Education testing can’t tell us anything about who will be successful (in the social mob)! It has to stop!! A five minute video will double your lifetime earnings!!
Dumbness is the new smartness, America! All you need in ‘Merca to rise to the top of the US government is a phys ed degree and three years experience teaching pre-school!
Two thoughts:
1. Where would you put art and music?
2. There is a parallel to one (of the many) flaws of NHST. “Bad” evidence (meaning you reject the null of no effect), but that doesn’t mean your alternative hypothesis is correct.
I’ve long been annoyed by the existence of punditry in general — the swarm of commentators on politics, economics, etc., who churn out lots of words, who are never assessed on their accuracy and who, when they are, are usually found lacking. (My new favorite: the endless commentary on AI by people who have never written a computer program or fit parameters to data.) I wonder: why do people listen to so much of this? But sometimes I think that the B.S. is like the sound of wind through trees or a rushing stream, background white noise that isn’t meant to have any meaning; it’s just some sensory stimulation. The point of some fields, perhaps, is to provide white noise. That, then, is why one can get away with B.S.
I agree with the first sentence, but I’m a lot more cynical about B.S. I don’t think it’s white noise. People use it for a reason – to get something they otherwise couldn’t get when they have nothing to offer, or to get something because they know it works even if they do have something to offer.
How exactly would you propose to assess the accuracy of pundits? Most of what they do isn’t a matter of making straight-out predictions. They’re more interested in pronouncing on the causes of things that have already happened. Sometimes they make conditional predictions that course A will produce better consequences than course B, but that’s still hard to test. There’s no absolute arbiter who can assess the accuracy of those kinds of claims.
The subset of pundits who do concentrate on straight-out predictions have certainly had their accuracy assessed, and you can find out more information if you look into it. I’m thinking specifically of election prognosticators like Nate Silver, Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, Nathan Gonzales, G. Elliott Morris, Rachel Bitecofer, etc. Their track record isn’t perfect, but all in all it’s reasonably decent.
It’s been a long time since I looked into this, but there have been assessments like “Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air?” (2011) https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/An-Analysis-of-the-Accuracy-of-Forecasts-in-the-Political-Media.pdf , and I don’t think it’s uncommon to hear predictions like “the war in [X] will drag on for months/ end quickly / …”
“Literature: Here, being smart, or inspired, will do the trick. Consider Philip K. Dick, who believed all sorts of weird things which he transmuted into wonderful literature.”
There are surely a lot of smart and inspired people who tried and failed to thrive as authors.
Rick Deckard clinging to what he falsely believes is a real toad is not unlike crypto currency. In fact, an imaginary form of money is certainly an idea worthy of Dick. It makes as much sense as living in a subsurface hole on Mars.
BTW, the reference to Mrs. Jellyby is clearly intended to remind us that Dr. Cowen is smart, maybe smarter than the rest of us.
I mostly agree with OP, but whether you can BS literature is highly dependent on what’s meant by “literature.”
Most of what we label “literature” (as opposed to mere “fiction”) is relatively avant-garde, no? “Avant-garde” literature seems pretty easy to BS. (Same goes for avant-garde film, fine art, and *especially* music…)
Cowen was one of the earliest mainstream economists to make substantive public criticism of crypto, and is not a maximalist by any measure. Some of his softened stance around DeFi specifically may have come from being influenced by a16z, SBF, etc.
I think it depends what is the Final Arbiter in the field.
In Sports, Medicine and Engineering the final arbiter is Reality. If you build a bridge on BS it will fall. If you build a bridge on BS and it hold, the principle was not BS after all.
In Math, the correctness of your statement is based on the inner consistency in your arguments. You can’t BS these.
Science have a complicated relationship with Reality. It believes it is judged by Reality, but (at least in short terms) scientific community is much more important. And you can BS scientific community.
For Art and Philosophy, it is had to say if Final Arbiter even exists.
That post is one of the reasons I unsubscribed from MR, although it still wasn’t as bad and incoherent as the post about Putin being a “man of ideas.”
Anyway, smart people are better at coming up with clever defenses of asinine positions. And a certain kind of smart person is so impressed by their cleverness that they don’t always feel the need to bother proffering any defense; they just say weird crap like crypto scams make it bad to be unmarried (and male) above the age of 30 and just hope others give them the benefit of the doubt through virtue of being a smart person.
Andrew, I think you are effectively talking about what economists call bubbles: there is no “fundamental” to justify the “prices” (broadly interpreted, prices can be eg the reputation of a scientist, and the fundamental the value of the science produced). They are one of the most interesting phenomena, and should not be dismissed as credulous people buying the BS of the day.
While you can have bubbles with rational agents (see http://www.nber.org/papers/w24234 for a recent survey), crypto may be explained by bounded rationality. On the one hand, you hear (some) experts telling you that this is a bubble, but on the other hand you see people making money by participating (and of course you don’t see the losses, because they have not happened yet or are not as widely advertised).
If the latter goes on for decades, you really have to believe in your theory to stay out of it. This is what happened to a lot of economists: first the profession mostly dismissed crypto as a bubble, and then as the years rolled by some softened their position or caved in entirely and tried to rationalize it. This, unfortunately, happens a lot in science: very few people have the tenacity to believe in something when their peers are dismissive. A recent (positive) example is Katalin Kariko and colleagues who worked on mRNA therapy for decades, with little recognition, until COVID19 came along.
[Incidentally, I find “being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30” funny. In quite a few EU countries, a lot of people live in stable partnerships, have kids etc, and just don’t marry. No one cares, and people don’t ask about it.]
Tamás:
Yeah, the “Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30” thing seemed like a “tell” (as they say in poker) that Cowen was engaging in what he would call “mood affiliation” here.
I was confused when I realized when American moralists talk about marriage they don’t mean the most common legal forms where I grew up (common-law partnership or going to a city hall and signing a paper) but one legal form which in some parts of the USA is hard to use without involving a religious institution.
But I think Cowen’s audience for that line is resentful about their lack of long-term sexual-romantic relationships in general, not about a specific legal form. Life in car cultures has become very isolating for many.
I remember the good old days when this blog was mainly about statistics. Talk about fall in status.
Statlover:
This blog has always been about statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science. Statistics involves learning about the world from quantitative data, and a big part of this learning is through substantive theories in social science and elsewhere. Understanding how scientific theories develop and are evaluated is important for doing statistics. Statistics is much more than the old-fashioned textbook approach where your only job is to solve mathematical problems that have been supplied to you externally.
P.S. if you do like our old blogposts, check out our StatRetro twitter feed.
I wonder if the crack about “being an unmarried male over 30” is fanservice. A lot of online social criticism is written by clever introverted or autistic men between 25 and 40 who want a lover but are not sure how to find one and use writing on the Internet to distract themselves from going out and talking to strangers (Scott Alexander of SlateStar was a clear example until he got married in 2022). I suspect that that demographic is well represented among Cowen’s commentariat; they certainly have a lot of resentful men.