In a previous post, I referred to Feynman Integrity as one possible guide to a life in science. An alternative is what I’ll call Stigler Conviction. This being the Internet, I’ll start with the smallest quote that conveys what Stigler conviction means. But because it helps to read this quote in context, at the end of this post, I’ll present a longer, unedited passage that contains it: Although … new economic theories are introduced by the technique of the huckster, I should add that they are not the work of mere hucksters.

In a previous post, I said that my claim about mathiness could be reduced to two assertions: Economist N did X. X is wrong because it undermines the scientific method. I reported that in conversations with economists I referred to loosely as freshwater sympathizers, I found agreement on 1 but disagreement on 2. Specifically, I heard two things: a) Yes, but everybody does X; that is how the adversarial method works.

You can boil my claim about mathiness down to two assertions: Economist ||N|| did ||X||. ||X|| is wrong because it undermines the scientific method. Claim 1 is a positive assertion, a statement about “what is …” Claim 2 is a normative assertion, a statement about “what ought …” As you would expect from an economist, the normative assertion in claim 2 is based on what I thought would be a shared premise: that the scientific method is a better way to determine what is true about economic activity than any alternative method, and that knowing what is true is valuable.

Suppose I have an IoT device, controlled by firm A, that buys a bunch of services from firm B. I will be responsible for all the charges, even if I had no idea that firm A was going to make these purchases on my behalf. Over the weekend, I discovered that I had such a device and that the money at risk is not trivial. A background process called nsurlsessiond that Apple uses to manage iCloud services downloaded 400 GB (yes, GIGA and yes BYTES) of data to my iMac over the course of 31 hours.

The usual narrative suggests that the new mathematical tools of modern finance were like the wings that Daedalus gave Icarus. The people who put these tools to work soared too high and crashed. In two posts, here and here, Tim Johnson notes that two government investigations (one in the UK, the other in the US) tell a different tale. People in finance used math to hide what they were doing.