Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThe conditions under which equilibrium prices really are all a decision-maker needs to know, and really are sufficient for coordination, are so extreme as to be absurd.
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 1st of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsI don't think this sort of pathology is intrinsic to market exchange; it comes from market exchange plus gross inequality.
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 2nd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThere is, in other words, a strong case to be made for egalitarian distributions of resources being a complement to market allocation.
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 3rd of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsBeyond the repulsiveness of the values it embodies, markets in areas like health care or information goods are always inefficient (over and above the usual impossibility of informationally-efficient prices).
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 4th of 6 in this piece
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Our reading
Planning a whole economy would be computationally intractable for the foreseeable future.
Their wordsPlanning for the whole economy would, under the most favorable possible assumptions, be intractable for the foreseeable future, and deciding on a plan runs into difficulties we have no idea how to solve.
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 5th of 6 in this piece
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Their wordsThat planning is not a viable alternative to capitalism (as opposed to a tool within it) should disturb even capitalism's most ardent partisans. It means that their system faces no competition, nor even any plausible threat of competition.
↗In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves Youbactra.org 6th of 6 in this piece
- 5 years earlier
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Their wordsFactor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure.
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Their wordsExploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.
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Their wordsSince that's about the only case which anyone does advance for g, however, which accords very poorly with other evidence, from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, about the structure of the mind, it is very hard for me to find any reason to believe in the importance of g, and many to reject it.
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Our reading
That IQ tests are unbiased across groups is highly implausible and empirically unsupported.
Their wordsThere are a very narrow set of technical conditions which let you out of this, i.e., which let you combine group differences, measurement unbiasedness and predictive unbiasedness. (See Millsap's papers for details.) That IQ tests satisfy them is highly implausible, and, to say the least, empirically unsupported.