{"id":95,"date":"2013-02-27T15:03:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T20:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2013-05-10T11:07:54","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T16:07:54","slug":"remembering-armen-alchian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/remembering-armen-alchian\/","title":{"rendered":"Armen Alchian &#038; Unnecessary Mathematical Fireworks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/multimedia\/daily-podcast\/remembering-armen-alchian\">Cato Daily Podcast :: Remembering Armen Alchian<\/a><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.cato.org\/longtail-iframe\/node\/45006\/field_longtail_player\/0\" width=\"320\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Don Boudreaux discussing Armen Alchian's preference for clear prose over \"mathematical pyrotechnics\" reminded me of a few neural networks researchers I know. I won't name names, because it wasn't a favorable comparison. There's far too much equation-based whizz-bangery going on in some papers.<\/p>\n<p>I use to think the problem was insufficient sophistication in my own math background, but I've recently heard independently from two very smart people in our Applied Math\/Scientific Computing program that they also find the math in a lot of these papers to be more of an obfuscating smoke screen than a clarifying explication. If they find it hard to follow I've got good reason to believe the problem isn't just me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cato Daily Podcast :: Remembering Armen Alchian Don Boudreaux discussing Armen Alchian's preference for clear prose over \"mathematical pyrotechnics\" reminded me of a few neural networks researchers I know. I won't name names, because it wasn't a favorable comparison. There's &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/remembering-armen-alchian\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[3,4],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-2","category-cs","tag-computer-science","tag-econ","wpautop"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3sddF-1x","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":885,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/latitude-longitude-distance\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":0},"title":"Latitude-Longitude Distance","author":"jsylvest","date":"20 January 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Updated: I noticed a floating point error when using this that I discuss correcting at the end of this post. I thought I would post some of the bite-sized coding pieces I've done recently. To lead off, here's\u00a0Ruby function to find the distance between two points given their latitude and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.","src":"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics\/actually.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1533,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2019\/05\/%e2%81%82-asterisms-in-latex-%e2%81%82\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":1},"title":"\u2042 Asterisms in LaTeX \u2042","author":"jsylvest","date":"9 May 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a snippet of LaTeX I put together so that I could use asterisms (\u2042) when writing papers. I use them to mark off sections of text which will need further attention when editing. unicode index:U+2042 (8258)HTML escapes:&#8258;&#x2042;UTF8:e2 81 82 I should really get around to cleaning up and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":351,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/reading-list-for-2-may-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":2},"title":"Reading List for 2 May 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"2 May 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Marginal Revolution :: Tyler Cowen :: Is there a shortage of STEM workers in the United States? Simplified analogy: I'm not bidding up the price of quadcopters. That doesn't mean that if we had more of them I wouldn't find cool stuff to do with them. (For other takes on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Reading Lists&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Taschen information graphics book","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/rendgen-information-graphics-201x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":703,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/reading-list-for-23-september-2013\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":3},"title":"Reading List for 23 September 2013","author":"jsylvest","date":"23 September 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Arnold Kling :: Big Gods Here is a question to think about. If religions help to create social capital by allowing people to signal conscientiousness, conformity, and trustworthiness [as Norenzayan claims], how does this relate to Bryan Caplan\u2019s view that obtaining a college degree performs that function? That might explain\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Reading Lists&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Reading Lists","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/reading-lists\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Some sample pilcrows from the H&FJ foundry.","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/h%2Bfj_pilcrows.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1144,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/malconv\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":4},"title":"MalConv: Lessons learned from Deep Learning on executables","author":"jsylvest","date":"8 December 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't usually write up my technical work here, mostly because I spend enough hours as is doing technical writing. But a co-author, Jon Barker, recently wrote\u00a0a post on the NVIDIA Parallel For All blog about one of our papers on neural networks for detecting malware, so I thought I'd\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"The MalConv architecture","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/malconv.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/malconv.png?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/malconv.png?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":62,"url":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/computational-cartography-part-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":95,"position":5},"title":"Computational Cartography (Part 2)","author":"jsylvest","date":"20 February 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"In the previous post I talked a bit about how one might build a system which would algorithmically divide the US into 50 states of approximately equal populations. I've messed around with the problem a bit and developed a very rough approximation. Actually, I don't even feel comfortable calling this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding&quot;","block_context":{"text":"CS \/ Science \/ Tech \/ Coding","link":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/category\/cs\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"auto sized states - after","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/auto-sized-states-after-1024x768.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/auto-sized-states-after-1024x768.png?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/auto-sized-states-after-1024x768.png?resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/auto-sized-states-after-1024x768.png?resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jsylvest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}