I am a lousy mathematician. I can’t do algebra. My eyes glaze over when asked to follow calculations on the board. And I have a really bad memory. These are just a few of my keys to success.
Because I have minimal facility with technical arguments I had to learn early on how to translate them into natural language so that I could understand them. It takes a long time. And quite often its just impossible to do. In those cases I have to give up.
But when it works, I come away with a unique way of explaining things that are otherwise “left to the appendix.” It makes for good seminars. And it makes teaching time consuming but fun.
Best of all is that enough practice with this and it begins to pay off in research. I can’t “figure things out” with a pen and pad in front of me. Instead I start with an intuition, explain it to myself in a natural language, and see where that goes. Progress usually means formalizing the intuition, seeing some implications on paper, and then retranslating those back, etc. (It helps when I have the talented co-authors I work with.)
I count this liability as a virtue because a) I have to find something to say I am good at, b) being able to explain things in plain language is a valuable skill which I am forced to acquire and c) I’d like to think that it acts as a mild fiddle-filter. If I try hard and I can’t explain it convincingly it words, I am content to say that it must not be a compelling idea. (Not to say that silly ideas don’t nevertheless sometimes slip through the filter.)
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December 8, 2009 at 8:41 am
spencer
any concept in economics you can not explsin to your father-in-law, i.e., an intelligent layman, will eventually be proved wrong.
December 8, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Peter Klein
Jeff, you may be what Hayek called a “puzzler” or “muddler.” You really should read his essay “Two Types of Mind.” Here he distinguishes puzzlers (he puts Frank Knight, Friedrich Wieser, and himself in this category) from what he calls “masters of their subject” (Jacob Viner, Bohm-Bawerk). E.g.: “I owed whatever worthwhile new ideas I ever had to not being able to remember what every competent specialist is supposed to have at his fingertips. Whenever I saw a new light on something it was as the result of a painful effort to reconstruct an argument which most competent economists would effortlessly and instantly reproduce.”
December 8, 2009 at 1:45 pm
jeff
Thanks Peter, I will definitely check it out.
December 9, 2009 at 8:17 pm
rd
you mean ‘why it pays to be maybe slightly dumber in some ways than some of the smartest people in the world, so long as you’re smarter and more resourceful in other ways’ ?
obviously the liability isn’t a virtue – if you didn’t have the liability you could still choose to develop the unique way of explaining things – you just wouldn’t have to, so you would probly choose not to. unless you’re arguing that you couldn’t explain things as well (no matter how hard you tried) if you understood them more easily – which I don’t think I buy
December 10, 2009 at 8:33 am
michael webster
You might be interested in this article about the relationship between mathematics and the success of science.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathphil-indis/
At least, it would help state whether you thought that mathematics in economics was: a) indispensable, or b) conservative.
December 16, 2009 at 12:32 am
Drunk Cycling « Cheap Talk
[…] the Levitt Dubner calculation. It only took me 5 minutes. (And I would appreciate if someone can check my math.) But then again, I am not trying to support a highly dubious and dangerous claim: So as you […]
December 19, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Anonymous
My advisor, who is a game theorist, seems to share the same with you in algebra.
March 27, 2010 at 12:43 am
Myrtle Beach Discount Cab
im not good at algebra either