If Richard Pryor had been in one of those old issues that I have gotten hold of, I would not have given a second glance. At that time, my eyes were peeled for two news items only: immigration reform in U.S. Congress and the latest trends in sciences and technologies. Immigration reformed will cut the wait in years for an entry visas; knowledge of trends in sciences and technologies will allow me to plan or forge a career path.
I thought I might have a chance to work in an area or a field that was been talked about in those popular weekly magazines. As I remembered it the magazines had glowing account of men managing the Vietnam War, and their arsenals of scientific tools. The magazines mentioned the management methods of Robert McNamara when he was a CEO of Ford Motor Company. Articles mentioned his “steel-trap mind,” helped along it appeared by the then popular acolytes of scientific management, such as critical paths, linear programming, game theory, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc. etc.
As I made a survey of the topics however, I found myself at odds over the classical maximum-minimum principle governing the thinking over many of these fields of studies. Nor could I believe that Nature is as overly deterministic and bloody minded as the least action principle of classical physics seems to demand. The idea of the biggest bang for the buck did seems a big much.
Faced with such doubts about determinism, I did what anyone with an ounce of free will would do: force oneself to a belief that freedom (or flexibility) must also be an essential element of Nature.
We know that these two polar elements are orthogonal to each other. And therefore how does one goes about incorporating the two diametrical opposites -- freedom and determinism -- into the same bosom of Nature?
One way of incorporation is to demand Nature to go in stages -- from big bang to big bang – from the states of being free or flexible to the states that are deterministic or single-valued. Like walking, a step at a time, shifting weights from left to right (L-R) and right to left (R-L).
From such beginnings, one didn’t have to go far to see that the formulation with freedom and determinism is analogous to the concepts: of order and disorder from thermodynamics; of mind and body from philosophy; of wave and particle from quantum physics; of variation and selection from evolutionary biology; of linear and nonlinear from mathematics and so on and on at infinitum.
If you carry on with this kinds of analogies, you will end up noting that nothing in Nature exists without their own special pairs of opposites.
The principle “RC to PC” (“roughly correct to precisely correct”) is one among the multitudes. An awkward formulation perhaps, but the formula is extremely useful to me from the point of view of the problems that I set out to understand.
At the least, it gives me a good set of nose for a healthy skepticism. Certainly a tad more “scientific” measure of what works than what you would get from knowing that something is “too good to be true”. Instead of saying something is too good to be true, I might have said that something is “too precise” to be workable or believable. “Premature precision” is the word I sometimes use.
It’s a useful metric.
However, the application of the rule has not been as straight forward in some cases, but it does not disappoint.
A reader can certainly judge for his/her-self whether the principle of RC to PC could have been helpful in the following problem-situations.
1. A President’s Daily Brief
“Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States” was the headline item in the President’ Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6th. PDB predates the actual attack on 9/11.
Congressmen wanted to know what was the state of intelligence and what if anything was been done about it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was the point woman of Bush administration. She started by giving a disquisition on the nature of information – the actionable information and the historical information [my italics]. She implied that August 6th PDB was a historical information, i.e. Bin Laden was a sworn enemy of the United States. Nothing new there.
She also said no one had briefed WH about “planes as missiles,” adding “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon,” and the World Trade Centers.
Of course. God himself would not have drawn such a detailed picture of the catastrophe that followed, for even a God – if He/She is a part of Nature -- must follow the principle of RC to PC.
Data are dead and desiccated without the foliage from a hypothesis.
A corollary to the principle of RC to PC is, absence the background (the “hypothesis”) the figure (the “data”) belongs everywhere and nowhere.
To be concrete, before 9/11, who has given a penny worth of thought about young Muslim men attending aviation schools?
2. Dominoes & Determinism
The Iraq War was fought for Peace – peace in the Middle East and beyond. The grand scheme we were told was a democratic Iraq, acting as the catalyst of change for the rest of the Arab world. From the Euphrates to the Niles. A fine piece of diplomatic vision worthy of a presidential ambition of a great powerful country.
Let’s go back to another time and another place – the place called Vietnam. The War rationale then was if Vietnam had fallen, other Asian countries likewise would have fallen to communism. Asian countries as dominoes, falling one after another. Determinism grimly at work.
The history has not blessed either visions, the one based on hopes or the other based on fear.
3. WMD-sized Derivatives
The Financial Meltdown of 2008 arrived in the United States and spread to the world. Another Great Depression was eminent. Congress called in the FED Chairman Alan Greenspan to explain the why and wherefore of the great calamity.
The congressional records have provided the full details – the questions, the answers and the explanations. However, the overwhelming substance and tone of the Chairman Greenspan’s answers were about a faulty worldview, about academic theory that spawned WMD-sized financial derivatives, about stats and maths models that reside on the hard disks of the FED and Wall Street supercomputers.
Of the latter, he said: “A Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the pricing model that underpins much of the advance in derivates markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria.”
The businesses of the world were run on autopilot, and everybody was watching the numbers on their respective meters, totally unaware of the impending darkness that was descending over them.
Asked to comment on the failure of the Federal Reserve to properly warn of the Financial Meltdown of 2008 Mr. Greenspan gave what I thought was a oracular answer. Risk models, according to the Chairman, were under pricing risk by assuming ever rising housing prices.
The Chairman appeared to be pointing the finger at the fragility of math models that the rocket scientists of Wall Street have built for themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment