From McNamara to the quants of today

[bigbadwolf]

From the (recently deceased) Robert McNamara to the quants of today, an article in Alternet:

Today, Mr. McNamara's ilk remain very much in charge.... And behind the present financial fiasco, we find any number of well educated young men working in elaborate offices and manipulating numbers and formulas thinking they control the world. And yes, at the same time committing fraud after fraud, and lying through their teeth every step of the way.

The essay got me to thinking: How far back does the idea of trying to control the world through numbers and formulas go? To Newton? To Bacon? The quants of today -- like the physicists -- are the heirs of these thinkers. And is the attitude and approach hubristic?

 

[Adam]

The essay got me to thinking: How far back does the idea of trying to control the world through numbers and formulas go? To Newton? To Bacon?

Farther back than that, I'd say. It was Archimedes who said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

 

[doug reich]

My understanding is that "modern" business, which was made up of lots of estimates previously, came about after the second world war. Prior to that, many companies and governments didn't have a budget; they kind of hand waved and when things came up short they would issue some bonds and swear to fix it the next time around. (Read his obituary in the Times -- Ford was like that when McNamara came around).

It is natural for people to take what they're good at and draw parallels in adjacent fields. This is exactly what academics started doing in the 1950s, and quants did in drips and drabs in the 60s, and then in droves in the 80s. You could make the same sweeping remarks deriding a scientific approach to civil and mechanical engineering dating back to the 19th century: things fell down and broke a lot, their users died in huge numbers, but the science advanced to the point today when it is extremely rare (although never rare enough) for widespread failure to happen. As many have said before, the solution isn't to outlaw innovation, it is to harness it. Progress, for better or for worse, will happen anyway.

 

[bluechimp]

Pen Maddy at UC Irvine has a paper titled 'How Applied Mathematics Became Pure'.

The abstract is as follows:

This paper traces the evolution of thinking on how mathematics relates to the world—
from the ancients, through the beginnings of mathematized science in Galileo and Newton, to the
rise of pure mathematics in the nineteenth century. The goal is to better understand the role of
mathematics in contemporary science.

Might not answer your question directly, but I enjoyed the short read.

 

[Roger Trimble]

The article draws a simple-minded connection between numbers and models to mass casualty in Vietnam. The author probably has no clue as to the scores of American lives that were saved by McNamara's statistical models in WWII. I am perhaps too young to have strong feelings either way about the guy ( definitely a child of Iraq, and not Vietnam ), I do know his analysis helped turn a losing air campaign into victory for the 8th Air Force.

 

[bigbadwolf]

The author probably has no clue as to the scores of American lives that were saved by McNamara's statistical models in WWII.

McNamara was a towering figure and this essay by Alex Cockburn pays fulsome tribute to his many accomplishments.

 

[bigbadwolf]

Pen Maddy at UC Irvine has a paper titled 'How Applied Mathematics Became Pure'.

Might not answer your question directly, but I enjoyed the short read.

She draws on Klein's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times" a fair bit (and it's a worthwhile book to own). I don't see much of anything original in the paper. There's a constant tension between mathematics and the world of sense experience. Good mathematics always relates to this other world in some way; mathematicians do not construct abstract axiomatic systems out of the blue. And this relatedness (albeit indirect) can be seen, for example, in the work of Atiyah, of Donaldson, of Borcherds. No-one is going to win a Fields Medal for some abstract axiomatic system.