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(Reblogged from seedz)
One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the engineering, business and technical fields (Mr Marks writes about the tech industry), are often most reluctant to consider social problems from a statistical point of view, and prefer to consider them as individual moral or motivational stories. We have a curve composed of 150m dots that is becoming steeper and more parabolic. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and you’ll find a lot of cultural-studies majors working for environmentalist nonprofits who support changing systemic rules to flatten the slope. Go into the financial-institution office buildings that surround them, and you’ll find a lot of math majors devising computer models for risk-weighting assets who think the dots on the bottom end should try harder to get into the top end. It’s weird.
(via rustbelts)
This is a really good point but in my experience there’s also an attitude among quants of distributional determinism: these distributions are the natural outcome of an interactive system and even if changing the rules to affect the parabolas were moral it is doomed to failure. So individual effort isn’t just the “right” answer, it’s the only possible answer withing a mathematically ordained reality. They’re not ignoring the curves, they’ve just internalised them.
(Source: economist.com)
