Celebrated but undisturbed

Scramble

A particular kind of egg, enjoyed very much with masala made from onions, garlic and tomatoes.
A rush, the adrenaline kind, to write write write. A mess, usually imposed by an external authority.

If you're looking for a point (or a silent sky) you won't find it here. I write this on a table not mine, in a room with furniture not mine, having just got back to a wonderful productive r u s h from a nice break.

I like that. To make a point, one can utilize font style. How much I wish I could write my papers like this. Hey academia, I'm talkin' to you.

"Now, the FCC won't let me be, or let me be me, so let me see..."

See previous post for where I was, incidentally I got that picture of the internet, but I saw it by mine own two eyes. I was called mamu multiple times by the cutest little adorable kid of a cousin sis who has matured into this half elder sister half mother figure that still throws me off. Especially since her face still looks sixteen.  She's married well. I love visiting them. Upper east side, get off at 86th and Lexington.

In-laws were also around, so it was good, showing them around the city. Took the ferry ride yet again, I don't get bored on a boat. I like watching the water. We experienced a rude Chinese waiter which wasn't fun, and Central Park which was. Sis-in-law surprised both of us by downing three shots of (admittedly mediocre) Tequila on a night out in the city. But hell, Tequila is Tequila. Lotsa alcohol content.

Girl and me, we trekked around the city, got a bit drunk at Bryant Park. "It's nice isn't it, all these bankers around us" "Yeah, they look so clean even though it's the end of the day"... "S has really done well to keep calling all these years, na?" "Your friends tend to do that"

We also interrupt an old man taking a photograph, girl is all "oh sorry". Old man is of the sweetheart type, replies "it's you I wanted!"

But the key revelation: "Women here really wear nice earrings". It's true, I never notice earrings. Has anyone else realised this, how women do all sorts of things men never even see? In any case, if you want see nice earrings, come to New York. Also, a lot of the women wear these impossible heels, cousin sis also mentions this, yet they walk around okay.

Also, met up with old friend, who surprised me by telling me she used to live in those parts, for three years. During school. Ruminated a bit over the probability of the two of us drinking masala chai in lower Chelsea, of all places. A bit surreal, she said, this. Is of the generally fed up with work life, but don't know what else to do. "I want to write, but where will the money come from?" "Feed the soul"  "But what about my stomach?"

In New York

On a recent visit to the Big Apple:

 And yes, I did look at the catalog. It was free, after all.

A Selection Problem

People think that people who sleep around are "loose", whereas they may simply be looking for validation.

People think that people who don't sleep around at all are "uptight", whereas they may simply have never had the chance.

It is a natural conclusion from these two statements that people who have never had the chance, but have the self-confidence to not seek validation are probably what we may term "well-adjusted". Neither loose, nor tight.

Since one cannot "know" with perfect certainty what a person's motivations are - indeed, one may not even know one's own motivation - well, then...

Bleg Blog

How many blogs talk wistfully about Delhi, this one included?

And how many don't?

And where, for the ones that do, do the authors originate?

Staticity

"Oh where, oh where
Can my baby be?
The Lord took her
Away from me"

I can't bear to read anything these days. Correction. I can't bear to read any economics these days. I don't quite understand it. I can't bring myself to properly write; all I have been doing is gritting teeth, grinding my molars away, writing up a "literature review". Reading turgid, stultifying prose and trying to breathe, no, blow some life into it. Giving it my "spin", my "voice". Which, heaven knows, isn't professional at all.

Well, at the very least, I console myself, you get the relevant literature out of the way. It has to be read. May as well do it when motivation is dragging, that too at a time when it shouldn't be. Should be. Shouldn't be. Should-a could-a would-a. Allocation of scarce resource, Ricardo be proud.

It is really worrying, this dearth of properly constructed sentences. Introductions that are cut-copy-paste. Predictable. Nothing new to see here, move on. Ideas that are minimal at best. What are we doing? Creating this monster called academia, for what? To pull this dataset one way, then another. To make this assumption, that assumption, this equilibrium that solution. Drowning in our mediocrity, we gasp for the few tufts of air that seem to come once every twenty years so.

And then you have the friends, colleagues is the grown up word. Who laugh when you say research must reflect life. Or, when you complain about the dryness of academic writing. They make my head spin, my falafel sandwich taste of dust. Why are you even here? I wish to complain. Go sell some toothpaste. Or something. Don't spoil my world, I got enough cynicism for two here.

To recover from all this, I read Barzel, Coase, McCloskey. All within the space of an hour. Restore my faith in the ability of humans to think and reason. I see faculty walking around, I share a joke about the economic view of corruption, the old man laughs. Sweet relief. Here it is, finally, the reason why I get into this mess in the first place.

“The lighthouse is simply plucked out of the air to serve as an illustration. The
purpose of the lighthouse example is to provide,” quoting now from Gilbert and Sullivan’s
operetta, The Mikado, “‘corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an
otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’” (Coase, 1974, p. 375).

~

I've been having debates about my work, mild little spars. Everything always comes down to the same thing - what do you believe is right? Belief; right-ness. How is anyone supposed to answer these questions? Here's my model, there's my regression. Don't believe it? Be my guest, I think, walk away. I can't argue with a belief. But I press on, no see, if what you say is true, then so-and-so must happen, but actually this-and-that does, so...

~

Had a happy conversation last night, she was laughing at nearly all my rubbish jokes. What a contrast to the nightmare I encountered - ha yes they've started what with all this 'where-is-my-life-going' conundrum that finishing a doctorate degree entails - a beggar woman we refuse to pay, who follows us, then starts to run behind us, I turn to her to face her, there's nothing but emptiness where her face should be, only a strangely sonorous chant of the Spanish word puta (go Google it). Ugh, I had to wake up after that. Maybe it was the recycled furniture in the room that brought it on; perhaps feelings cling to wood.

"And on my deathbed I will pray to the gods and thee angels,
Like a pagan to anyone who will take me to heaven;
To a place I recall, I was there so long ago."

Fly on the (economist grad student) wall

The following is an email exchange I had with my advisor. I was troubled by what I saw being published - naive idiot, yes - and railed against it in my typical juvenile fashion. 

Here's me:

"There appears to be some link between (leading article published by leading researcher in top journal) and (not so leading researcher publishing in a close to the top journal)

Another reason (yet another…) why writing this stuff out is making all these parallels come out. I decided to quickly go over the main points of the (leading researcher) paper – just scanning the introduction and the final discussion, conclusion bits – and here’s what I find...(some details)

 Wow. Not only is this missing out on the central message of the model, what message is coming out is also (apparently) incorrect.

Sometimes this kind of stuff troubles me; if one the leading experts is writing confusedly what does this say about the profession? Forget about being right or wrong, surely one should at least get the basic point of a paper…"

 

Here's advisor:

"You would be surprised how common it is for economists (even prominent economists) to misunderstand each others' work.  Papers aren't always 100% clear, and people are busy, so they read quickly.  And being a leading expert doesn't necessarily mean that you understand others' work any better.  You become a leading expert by publishing a lot, not necessarily by reading a lot.  In general, knowing what other work is being done helps a lot in writing good papers.  But that doesn't mean you need a perfect understanding.  And there are a lot of people who are good at doing original research and writing good papers, but not at all good at understanding others' work.

 

There are a few ways to tell based on CVs who is likely to be good at understanding others' work.  People who have substantial experience as journal editors tend to be in that category, for example.  So do people who look "overplaced" -- they have a relatively thin CV for the department they're in.  Look for the opposite cases -- people who are prominent but haven't done much journal editing, and people who look "underplaced" -- and those tend to be the people who aren't good at understanding others' work.  Of course, those aren't perfect indicators (particularly the over/underplaced measure).

 

Anyway, don't let this trouble you too much.  Errors like this do tend to get corrected eventually (though it sometimes takes a while)."

 

People are going to screw up. Even the well regarded ones. Takes the pressure off. In fact, I have only documented more of this sort of writing - confusing at best, incorrect at worst - so much so that I have virtually given up any hope of a general understanding being reached. But this is perhaps inevitable; an outcome of a process where freedom to question is generally allowed. Incorrect or misleading statements will happen. One must tolerate this, otherwise you end up being a servant of thought, not its master.

 

Art/Life/Duality

"Players may have different beliefs (priors) due to different information they acquired during their lives. Theoretically, one may try to model all this learning as simple Bayes' update of a prior one has at birth. Unrealistic as this may sound (or, indeed, be), this story could still be (a part of) a viable model, the reduction of all decision problems in one's life to one "grand decision.

Yet people surely differ even at birth. For instance, they have different genes which may
determine both their utilities and priors. Therefore, the argument goes one step further and
considers the "players" before they acquired the information contained in their genes.

Thus, we are asked to think of some intelligent entity capable of logico-mathematical reasoning but which does not yet know what actual player it will materialize in. At the moment of birth (or
conception, or even much earlier, depending on the reader's faith and social policy preferences),
this intelligent entity--the empty shell--learns the genes it got, updates its prior and becomes a
"regular" player with a utility function and beliefs that are now the posterior.

However, the "empty shell" argument concludes, before learning the genes, there is no
reason to distinguish between these empty shells. They are all identical, since any distinction
among them is assumed to be learned later on. In particular, they all have the same prior.

One extreme view of empty shells is that they are (almost) nothing but the logico-mathematical entity needed to "understand" the model and reason about it. According to this view, they are free from all that is mundane, and, in particular, have no preferences. Loosely, pure logico-mathematical entities simply don't care (about anything).

But if empty shells do not (yet) have preferences, one may not attempt to derive priors
from them a la Ramsey, de Finetti and Savage, and the concept of "prior" becomes somewhat
metaphysical."

-"Why the empty shells were not fired", Itzhak Gilboa, 2010

"I came from nothing before nothing began
Broke the window of existence and became a man
No sympathy for fools, my star is black and burned
I tilt toward the light, I suck your souls into my might

We are starchildren, coming out of nowhere and to nowhere return
Starchildren, a hundred million souls sucked out in one breath"

"Starchildren", Bruce Dickinson, 1996

The Basic Philosophy: Sure, Sharp, Economic

I've been on a Joan Didion trip recently, ever since I discovered, somehow, her book titled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". I liked the vision in that title, apparently it's a quote out of Yeats. Or Keats. One of those poet type people who everybody quotes but nobody reads. 

I picked up a compilation, a fat, heavy monster leaning in on 1000 pages, this titled "We tell ourselves stories in order to live". Jaw drops to floor when I read that and immediately issue it (see I'm poverty struck I haven't bought a book in, I think, 4 years now. With my own money that is. Thank you, library!). A powerful line, but check the following extract, it's from a book boringly called "The White Album". Emphasis in italics, they are mine.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five...We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

In many ways, the pursuit of a line of inquiry into the world  - otherwise known as "research" - is, implicitly or explicitly, exactly this. The problem is most people conducting the damn research are unaware, trusting in some misplaced notion of "Science" (with a capital S) as being this purely objective thing that arrived by itself and dribbles itself into our conscience every now and then. 

Recognizing that in research we are essentially carrying out "the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images" would benefit not just the researcher and the research, but also the world wide notion of what research is. Telling stories. To live. 

"You know, some people got no choice
and they can never find a voice
to talk with that they can even call their own
So the first thing that they see
that allows them the right to be
why they follow it, you know, it's called bad luck."

"Street Hassle", Lou Reed, 1978

monotonicity

It's always fun to wake up to music, to sleep to it, something in your brain unlocks.

This youtubing of all songs has nearly destroyed an activity I used to indulge in; of sleeping to an album. I wonder how many people do it.

That's all for now, I guess. I agreed to do some random poster presentation this week, don't ask me why. Spreading the gospel, I describe the motivation to one co-graduate student.

Blogger is now offering me all sorts of exciting statistics, so this deals a slight slap to my deliberate I don't want to know my readers philosophy, the handful that there are. Surprise, surprise the largest amount of traffic comes via the two blogs that list this bit of the internet vacuum in their "blogroll".

Asking my advisor about what "editorial review" he says it is "at least mildly better" than a desk reject. This is a phrase falling straight out of intro micro economics on the relations of preference, but it is at least mildly poetic. So my article is now being read by greater powers.

I will write about my Delhi visit. Some highlights: the girls are dressing better, although some of the skirts on the school girls are of questionable intent; the food remains excellent *sigh*; Hauz Khas Village (or "HKV" as one of my friends put it, I spent 20 minutes searching for "HKV restaurant/pub/bar" before getting back to said friend) is a revelation both good and bad; DU/CP/Khan remains mostly the same with Khan sliding more; the roads were unrecognizable for the most part; I didn't hate Gurgaon this time; heard all the item numbers with more attention that they perhaps deserve, this unbridled sexuality seems a revolution, Dibakar Banerjee claims its the easiest way to claim progress without really doing anything.