Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (92 page)

Misunderstanding in social science literature:
Typical mistake, consider the ignorance of the problem by hyperactive promoters of the idea such as Ayres (2007): “Want to hedge a large purchase of Euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock,” p. 11.

Stan Young’s crusade:
Young and Carr (2011). Also Ioannides (2005, 2007).

Doxastic commitment:
Levi (1980).

Salt:
Very convincing Freedman and Petitti (2001), relies on visualization of data rather than metrics. Note “neither author consults for the salt industry,” the kind of thing I read
first
.

Graph on Big Data:
By Monte Carlo simulation; used >0.1, or beyond what correlations are loved in social science (it is hard to analytically do the analysis because of the need for large matrices to remain positive-definite). The convexity is invariant to the correlation threshold.

Solution to the researcher’s bias in clinical trials:
Goldacre (2009) suggests the establishment of a database of trials, forcing researchers to record their failures. Anything is better than what we got.

The collective and fragility:
The power of the collective rests on benefits from efficiency, hence fragility: people start substituting collective judgment for individual judgment. This works fine—it is faster and cheaper (hence more
efficient
) than having to reinvent the wheel individually. But like everything that is a shortcut, it ends blowing up in our faces. In the world in which we live the effect is compounded—the scale is larger and larger; the collective is planetary.

Jobs and artisan ethics:
This makes me worry: “Playboy: ‘Are you saying that the people who made PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?’ Jobs: ‘If they did, they wouldn’t have made the PCjr.’ ”
Playboy
[
sic
], Feb. 1, 1985.

Busting the hypothesis of hyperbolic discounting:
Read and Airoldi (2012).

Other discussions of Big Data and researchers gaming the system:
Baumeister et al. (2007) about self-reporting in psychology. Kerr (1998) about hypothesis following the results, and post hoc in Yauan and Maxwell; Yarkoni for the large
M
(dimension) low
N
(data) problem.

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