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.

Anybody interested in the future of mathematical theory in economics should read Cesar Hidalgo’s book Why Information Grows. There are many things to like about this lucid account of the evolution of our scientific understanding of information. One of the most important may be the simplest. It illustrates what it means to think like a physicist. Thinking like a physicist is very different from using such tools from physics as partial differential equations.

If we broaden the frame from mathiness narrowly defined and look for academics who are guided by the norms of politics instead of the norms of science, it is not hard to find examples from both ends of the political spectrum. No matter which end they come from, they can bring science to a halt. If you ever want to reach a scientific consensus about anything–whether wage growth in the UK has been positive or negative, whether England even exists–you will not want to invite either Niall Ferguson or Paul Ehrlich into the discussion.

It might be helpful to pull back from some of the specifics in the instances of mathiness that I’ve cited in recent posts and recap the background motivation, which springs from concern about the interaction between science and politics. I. There are two different styles of discourse–the discourse of politics and the discourse of science. They are supported by different norms about good ethical behavior and acceptable professional conduct. A. Reputation