Esther-Mirjam Sent has a work in progress regarding how Herbert Simon made an ass of himself in debating with progressive mathematicians, who did not approve of Samuel Huntington joining the National Academy of Sciences. She included two wonderful quotes from one of the mathematicians, Neal Koblitz regarding economist misuse of mathematics.
Sent, Esther-Mirjam. 2008. "Mathematical Verbiage as a Witch Doctor's Incantation? Herbert Simon vs. The Mathematics Community." unpub.
Koblitz, Neal. 1988. "A Tale of Three Equations: Or the Emperors Have No Clothes." The Mathematical Intelligencer, 10: 1, pp. 4-10.
10: "Mathematical verbiage is being used like a witch doctor's incantation, to install a sense of awe and reverence in the gullible and poorly educated."
Koblitz, Neal (1981) "Mathematics as Propaganda." in Lynn Arthur Steen, ed. Mathematics Tomorrow (New York: Springer-Verlag): pp. 111-120.
Koblitz (1981) had noted: "Mathematics can be used to mystify and intimidate rather than to enlighten the public."
9 comments:
So how does one get a copy of Sent's unpublished paper?
Hah! I've been to cryptography lectures given by Neal Koblitz -- he's a colorful character and a brilliant number theorist.
I have not read this paper by Sent, but I have read some others by her about him and know her as well as having known Simon when he was alive. Simon was very much a fan of the US military establishiment, so I can well imagine him getting into an argument with somebody who would be trying to block somebody from being in the NAS on political grounds, with Huntington certainly being a right winger. Maybe Esther-Miriam's paper makes this argument credibly, but offhand I do not see how Simon's views of the use of mathematics in economics would have had much to do with such a dustup.
For that matter, this is a bit of an odd tack. Simon was not a fan of conventional economics or the conventional use of mathementics in economics, although he was not against using math in econ. Simon was the inventor of the concept of bounded rationality and always felt alienated from academic economics, even after he received his Nobel Prize in economics, which many people at the time thought was some kind of outrage, although he looks more right with every passing day. He was definitely heterodox, if one whose views are increasingly accepted.
One sign of Simon's attitude is that at Carnegie-Mellon, where he is viewed as the most prestigious professor they ever had on the campus, he was a member of four departments, none of them being economics (psychology, computer science, cognitive science, and management). His Ph.D. was actually in political science.
I will also note that not too long before he died there was a very bad personal falling out between Herb and Esther-Miriam. I happen to have a lot of sympathy with her position in that situation. He caused her some really serious hassles at the time in a way that was not really fair or reasonable in my view. If this paper is dinging him a bunch, it is possible that there is an element of getting even with him, I fear, although I do not know as I have not read this paper. But, the story being told here, frankly does not quite fully make sense as presented.
Barkley
Michael McIntyre - Send her an e-mail?
The abstract:
Samuel P. Huntington, an exceedingly eminent political scientist from Harvard University, was nominated for the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1986, but not elected. He was put forward again in 1987, only to be turned down once more. Whereas the opposition to Huntington's membership was led by Yale University mathematician Serge Lang, NAS member and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon sought to come to the political scientist's defense with a paper on "Some Trivial But Useful Mathematics." This led to a heated exchange among mathematicians Neal Koblitz, Steven Weintraub, and Saunders Mac Lane on the one side and Herbert Simon on the other. Their disagreements concerned the meaning of continuity, assumptions about domains, and reasoning about ordinals, amongst others. While the mathematicians asked Simon "Why not use plain English that everyone can understand?", Simon replied that 'there is little point in debating someone who is so insensitive to accuracy in attribution and to the laws of logic." As this paper argues, the debates shed light on the operation of epistemic cultures, the limits to ordinal reasoning, as well as some traits often associated with fame.
Let me be more precise. I would not be at all surprised if Herb Simon "made an ass of himself" in his arguments with some "progressive mathematicians" about Huntington joining the NAS. He was a curmudgeonly character who was perfectly capapble of doing so, and to be frank, I would say that he did so in his dealings with Esther-Miriam Sent based on what I know of them.
However, I seriously doubt that his assishness had anything to do with him advocating conventional use of math in economics or the sort of thing that Koblitz was criticizing. Such conduct is worthy of criticism, and it goes on all the time. But it was not something that Simon generally engaged in, and most of his use of math in economics was empirical and of an unconventional but very defensible sort, such as estimating power law distributions for firm sizes in 1977, which was dismissed at the time by most other economists as wacko stuff (the conventional view was that the distribution was lognormal), but Simon has more recently been vindicated by the work of Robert Axtell, among others, with Simon's work on this now widely cited favorably in the econophysics and other literature, which tends to stress a focus on "just the facts, ma'am," and cut the bullshit pure math theories that are empirically garbage.
Barkley
I have no idea how Simon treated Esther. She once casually mentioned to me that after doing books on Simon and Thomas Sargent she was more sympathetic to the latter, which was not her expectation.
The mathematicians' criticism of Huntington was on technical grounds, probably reflecting the futility of making a political argument and appealing to the skepticism of scientists regarding so-called social sciences.
Simon's own skepticism about formal economics makes him a rather attractive figure. Here, however, what he did was to reformulate Huntington's simplistic mathematical statements, which were no more than something like (quality a) x (quality b) = (quality c), into more "sophisticated" economic notation. But he was in over his head with the mathematics, made a fool of himself, yet gloated about his supposed victory.
michael,
Again, have not seen the paper by Sent. The abstract does make it look like Simon may have been doing something that one would not expect of him. I did not know that Huntington ever did anything remotely mathematical, or apparently so. Simon may have defended him partly out of their common poli sci roots.
For what it is worth, I knew Saunders MacLane, a very eminent mathematician, and more of a conservative than a "progresive," if anything. MacLane was long a foe of misuse of mathematics by pretty much anybody, including social scientists in general, kind of a purist really. Simon does seem to have gotten himself into some deep doo doo on this one.
Again, I do not wish to get into the details, but I am more sympathetic with Esther-Mirjam than with Herb in the matter of their personal disagreement. Herb Simon was someone who is eminently admirable for most of his own intellectual work, but could be not so well behaved on the personal level.
Barkley
the math here is over my head, and i am sorry about that.
but from what i have seen the average public economist is misusing mathematics when he says that 2 plus 2 equals 4,
because he has usually done a very poor job of understanding just what he is adding and what the limitations of his model are in the real world.
or as Russell said, "in mathematics we never know what we are talking about or whether what we are saying is true."
I believe I should clarify something here. The "personal falling out" between Simon and Sent was over professional matters. She had had access to his personal papers, and he decided that he did not like some of the things that she was writing about him, so cut her off from the access and made attempts to block her publishing her papers.
This latest one clearly is not very complimentary of him, but the ones to which he was objecting were really not all that critical at all, and those of us who were following this were somewhat mystified as to why he was reacting as he was. Hence, my tendency to sympathize with her in the matter.
I would also like to reemphasize that even if Simon made some weak or poor arguments regarding the use of math in social science in this NAS/Huntington situation, he was very capable in math in general. He was an important figure in the development of artificial intelligence in computer science, and I will close by simply noting that this was motivated by his work on bounded rationality.
Barkley
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