The owners of America’s baseball teams, gathered at a Houston hotel last year, were discussing once again how their games had become so plodding. This time, however, the explanation was different. Two Major League Baseball officials and a statistician told the group that the sport was being brought to a standstill by the very phenomenon that has revolutionized it in recent years—the embrace of...
The quants run Wall Street now
It’s a quant world now: analysis of texts for causal language
Via Tyler Cowen: We hypothesized that the increased role of science, education, and technology in Western society in the relatively recent past should have been accompanied by detectable cognitive changes and, more specifically, by an increased focus on causality. To test this hypothesis, we measured the amount of causal language in historical texts in five corpora. In four of the five corpora...
It’s a quant world now: doctor’s office edition
Doctors Test Tools to Predict Your Odds of a Disease Dr. McGinn believes using technology to help diagnose and treat patients can reduce the large number of unnecessary tests doctors order and antibiotics they prescribe by ruling out certain diseases. It also could expedite the appropriate care for patients by giving doctors grounds to treat them before lab tests can confirm a diagnosis. The...
The problem with quant research that most quant folks refuse to acknowledge
This is one of the reasons I am a big proponent of replication and transparency in what we do. How is it that economists, working in good faith, wind up with dubious results? To start, they can overanalyze the data. Modern computers spit out statistical regressions so fast that researchers can fit some conclusion around whatever figures they happen to have. “When you run lots of regressions...
More evidence that quants rule the world: Indian love edition
An Indian bride walked out of her wedding ceremony after the groom failed to solve a simple math problem, police said Friday.
The bride tested the groom on his math skills and when he got the sum wrong, she walked out.
The question she asked: How much is 15 plus six?
His reply: 17.