"No wonder life (i.e., the thing that my once 10-year old niece referred to as “the thing that isn’t fair”) comes to us as a filigree of ash stories. Walking down the street past a couple in conversation, an overheard morpheme, a mere glance at a wrongly buttoned raincoat, sparks a narrative in our imagination. Ask any question beginning with “why?” and the answer will surely be a story, or it will be embedded in a story. Or, at the very least, it will offer a tempting thread for some story that you yourself will hold onto, embellish even, as you try to absorb the answer. We interpolate between such fragments. This is, for many of us, simply the way we think.
What about the “why questions” in science, in logic, in mathematics? We should acknowledge how they are often “what questions” or “how questions” in disguise. Or how they slide down into such questions, as the ever-elusive, ever-illusory quest for an X that actually causes a Y dissolves. Some of the more satisfying answers to scientific “why” questions involves deft rephrasing. “Why is the sky blue?” is replaced by the question “what is the function that describes scattering amplitude as dependent on wave-length”?"

"Efficient global optimization is the problem of minimizing an unknown function f, using as few evaluations f(x) as possible. It can be considered as a continuum-armed bandit problem, with noiseless data and simple regret. Expected improvement is perhaps the most popular method for solving this problem; the algorithm performs well in experiments, but little is known about its theoretical properties. Implementing expected improvement requires a choice of Gaussian process prior, which determines an associated space of functions, its reproducing-kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). When the prior is fixed, expected improvement is known to converge on the minimum of any function in the RKHS. We begin by providing convergence rates for this procedure. The rates are optimal for functions of low smoothness, and we modify the algorithm to attain optimal rates for smoother functions. For practitioners, however, these results are somewhat misleading. Priors are typically not held fixed, but depend on parameters estimated from the data. For standard estimators, we show this procedure may never discover the minimum of f. We then propose alternative estimators, chosen to minimize the constants in the rate of convergence, and show these estimators retain the convergence rates of a fixed prior."

"The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies."

"Let me start by saying that there's a way to take all this that makes it entirely correct. The key motive of science is explanation, and it's often essential to abstract away from the complexities of raw observation, and so on. I took courses from Chomsky as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and I'm grateful for what I learned from him, and for the eminently fair way that he always treated me. But increasingly, it seems to me, he has been elevating his personal distaste for the complexities of the real world into a systematic philosophy. To the extent that others accept these views, it excludes them from participation in (what I think are) the most promising and exciting current directions in the sciences of speech and language."

"What is it that mathematicians accomplish?"

"The beauty contest game concept originated with John Maynard Keynes [5] and has been studied in [3,7] and many other articles and experiments as a simple model of cognition and behavior. In a beauty contest game, all players guess a number within a given interval, with the goal of guessing p times the average of all other guesses, where p is a number in the interval (0, 1). For instance, for p = 1/2 and an interval of [0, 100], a player attempts to guess what will be half of the average of all guesses (including the player’s guess).…"

"The rest of the items in SEMAT’s proposal are mush. Of course our theories need to address technological and social issues. Of course they need wide support by several communities to be successful. Of course they must be flexible. But what should they consist of? What stake is SEMAT putting on the ground? Unfortunately, beyond a wish to be more like an engineering discipline, this proposal is completely vague, and therefore I cannot support it."

"Ironically, Popper’s original critique of empirical foundationalism thus paved the way for a new theoretical foundationalism. Either you are grounded in theory, or you have no grounds at all for claiming to be a competent participant. The new foundationalism here reveals its elitist and technocratic face as well as its impractical nature at once. It burdens researchers and professionals with the impossible role of having to “explain,” by virtue of their advantage of theoretical and methodological expertise, to all others what in a concrete situation would be a correct understanding of “the problem” and what might be done about it. At the same time, it largely immunizes these “explanations” against the critical efforts of concerned citizens. If they do not agree with the experts’ monologically presented findings and conclusions, it is their problem, as it were; for the reason can only be that they are insufficiently informed or […] unable to understand the reasoning of the experts."

"Yet before our eyes, another reality is emerging – or rather re-emerging, because it once served humanity for centuries. That reality is the commons, which derives from a different side of human nature, and therefore operates on different principles than the market supposedly does. That other side is not the sappy, self-sacrificing altruist that marketophiles posit as the only alternative to their model of human behavior. Nor is it the grim utilitarian socialist. Rather, it is whatever resides in us that wants to be engaged with and around other people – whether to accomplish a task or just because it is fun.
This convivial side of economic life is beyond the bandwidth of most economic thought. The corporate market tends to repress it, and partly for that very reason it has been fighting its way back through the concrete. Cyberspace and the World Wide Web gave it a vast and unenclosed new realm, much as the New World once did for the surging energies of Old Europe...."

"Foolish reliance on Li's model lead to disaster and it was made possible by CDS markets which convinced participants that they had many observations on the probability of default. They were convinced that prices revealed these probabilities because they had an insane mystical faith in the strong form efficient markets hypothesis and a schizophrenic simultaneous belief that they could beat the market."