On Sunday 12 February 2012 18:38:53 Warren Smith wrote:
Now I contend that the direct cause of this disaster was the Nobel Prize.
And the fact that Myron Scholes's parents met one another. And the fact of the particular unmodelled correlations that caused the particular disasters that happened. And any number of other things. It is a useful rule of thumb that whenever anyone refers to "the cause" of anything at all complex, what they say is approximate at best and nonsense at worst.
Generally speaking what happens is, some idiot is awarded the Nobel, and then every word he utters is believed like the Word Of God from then on often by immensely powerful and wealthy entities.
By the time they've got the Nobel they're generally already being treated as an oracle in some circles. The Nobel just gives their acolytes a bit more cover for treating their utterances as The Word Of God. Anyway. I agree, on the whole, with Mike Stay: neither math nor fun. -- g