Unconventional wisdom

The state of US-China trade relations: China keeps selling cheap stuff to the US, the US isn't selling so much to China (but plenty to other parts of the world). The Americans are demanding that the Chinese charge more, and the Chinese are refusing.

Source: The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford (Exeter College, Oxford), Financial Times, 10 Dec 2005



Different phases

Doing is part of learning only when it is directed by ideas.


lncreasing research attention is being directed towards the negative side of social interactions.


ln the beginning of the 20th century men were every where unconscious of the rate at which the world was growing. lt required the convulsion of the War to awaken the nations to the knowldege of their strength, for a year after the War had begun hardly anyone understood how terrific, how almost inexhaustible were the resources in force, in substance, in virtue, behind every one of the combatants. The vials of wrath were full: but so were the reservoirs of power.
The RT Hon Churchill, The World Crisis, 1928



The movement arose, as was natural, in the defeated countries. Their peoples seemed to have nothing more to lose. They were experiencing a misery so unprecedented that the possible miseries of the future had little terror of them. Despair and cynicism had destroyed all restraining influences.



History teaches us that some notorious, and indeed most cruel dictators came to power through elections. Yusuf Kanli, Turkish daily newspaper, 14 Sept 2007


Adam Smith declared that the countenance and behaviour of those we live with ....is the only looking glass by which we can, in some measure with the eyes of other people, scrutinise the propriety of our conduct (quoted in Bryson, 1945).



More on common sense

The Hotel and Catering Industry Training Board once asked one of their staff to perform a study into recruitment and staffing. He duly conducted a load of surveys and discovered, perhaps interestingly, that a large number of graduates were working as hotel porters. This, of course, was mainly because they were going on to do post-graduate academic work and were earning a bit of easy money over Summer or during a gap year or while studying. But the thing is, that last sentence is the result of common sense, not statistical analysis; it is the result of criticising, not accepting, a perfectly true statistic that makes too little sense. The HCITB employee in question didn't do this; he simply stuck all his data through his stats rules and presented his conclusions to the board, recommending, among other things, a vigorous graduate recruitment program to meet the industry's needs for hotel porters over the coming years. For this, he was rightly fired. True story.

A lot more damage is done to the reputation of the discipline of statistics by this common failure to factor in the thought that what you're measuring is usually too messy to be measured in the way you'd like. See also the profoundly held belief among too many statisticians that the effects of intentional acts can be measured in the same way as the effects of blind chance.
Source: WWW.adamsmith.org/blog
http://www.squandertwo.net/blog/2007/09/
lies-damn-lies-and-bloody-idiots.htm




.....next accosted a rather frail woman in her 50s, Elsa Ruff, from San Francisco. She said she was still trying to recover from a family tragedy three years ago. She had discovered that on long walks she had a sense that her deceased son was with her. Elsa seemed awfully frail for this ordeal. I asked her if she was afraid of highway robbers. "I'm not afraid of anything now," she said. "I lived in New York in the 1960s. I've been mugged by professionals."
Michael Johnson, Meanwhile: The Way of St. James, Herald Tribune, Sept 13