Magnificent Obsession, Part 2

Nobody really understands the economy.

This isn’t exactly a statement that inspires much dissent.

The current meltdown in the financial markets is probably, probably a good thing for someone who’s interested in the line of work I want to tackle.

These are fine, fine times to be a metaphysicist of economics.

(Wouldn’t that just make me a Meta-economist?)

(Nah, that sounds like someone who studies economists.)

A friend of mine, recently, told me something that Scott Adams suggested. Interestingly enough, another friend of mine, long, long time ago, told me that Scott Adams was into the whole “affirmation” thing (yes, that was you) and lately, that stuff has started to make more and more sense.

It’s that obsession thing I keep talking about. For those of you who are not aware of the fact that I do “keep talking about” it only read my blog. Shame on you. Get to know me as a person, dagnabit.

Anyway, back to obsessing about obsessing:

There’s something I want to do. I want to be the premiere thinker on a specific aspect of economics in the world – specifically, on the metaphysics, the underlying background, the fundamental stuff of what the ecnomomy is and the rules under which they opereate. It is my belief – nay, my conviction – that the state of economic knowledge today is commesurate with that of medicine before the days of William Harvey. Just as the absence of any knowledge of knowledge of Anatomy and Physiology, I’m sure that bleeding a patient who had a fever seemed perfectly sensible. Likewise, without any true understanding of what the economy is about, economic policy is likely to be just as helpful.

As I said, these are fine, fine times to study Metanomics. Unfortunately for me, that is not (yet!) my job.

You see, I want it to be my job. But as of right now, however well-informed my ideas are,k however accurately they model reality, no one gives a damn about my thoughts on the subject. (Well, maybe not no one but certainly no one who, given the context, matters.) So, my current job is to make the job of studying the metaphysics of the economy my future job. But that, my friends, is a multi-step process.

And here are the steps:

Ultimately, I want to be recognized as the foremost authority on Metaeconomics.

Before that I need to be recognized as an authority in economics.

That I will achieve by being a significant writer on the economy and economic topics.

But first I need to become a writer.

However, as I indicated earlier, I’m not exactly self-motivated material. To become a writer I must first REALLY, REALLY WANT to be a writer.

And that, my friends, is what my current job is: becoming obsessed with being a writer.

Of Math, Geekdom, Comics, and Sex

I nearly wrote a blog about Paul Erdős once.

That statement in itself is almost a half-joke.

(I still remember what I would have blogged about, had I actually written the blog in the first place. In fact, this is inspiration to go ahead and blog about it in the near future.)

A friend of mine long ago introduced me to xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. I don't read it nearly as often as I should. I have a couple other friends who also read it - given the subject matter, it would be hard not to love it. The thing is, it is brainier and geekier than any of my friends can probably appreciate: this isn’t a knock on my friends; it’s just that I am deficient in having friends who are mathematicians.

Though there are numerous mathematics in-jokes in the comic – and please don’t let that scare you from reading the comic: it is easily one of the most clever, smart, charming, and even heartwarming comics out there – there is one particular case in point that inspired this post. Needless to say, it has something to do with Paul Erdős, (pronounced Air-dish) the late mathematician who was the most prolific in history.

The title is Convincing Pickup Line. A girl and a guy are sitting at a table. The girl is showing him something on a piece of paper and trying to convince the guy that they should get together. “We’re a terrible match,” she says. “But if we sleep together, it’ll make the local hookup network a symmetric graph,” to which he responds: “I can’t argue with that.”

A little bit more about Erdős: because he was so prolific, and, more importantly, had so many collaborators, he constitutes a unifying thread among mathematicians. Just like Bacon numbers link actors according to how many movies it takes to link them, through co-stars, to Kevin Bacon, mathematicians have Erdős numbers that depend on how many papers it takes to link them to Erdős, either directly or through collaborators. Having written one with Erdős himself gives you a number of 1, having written one with one of his direct collaborators gives you a number of 2, etc.

Mathematicians are a weird bunch. Not only do they maintain their lists of Erdős numbers, take pride in their low numbers, etc., they even discuss the network of mathematicians who have collaborated at various removes with Erdős as a mathematical object itself! One mathematician once published a paper on the Erdős number network, noting that if two particular mathematicians within it published a paper together, the network would have an interesting mathematical property. The sappy conclusion to that story is that the two mathematicians did indeed decide to collaborate, in order to give the network that property.

While only a mathophile is likely to be familiar with that story, it doesn’t take a geek to figure that it served as the inspiration for the comic. I’m willing to bet that even my friends who like xkcd are unfamiliar with that story. But what I found most amusing was the rollover caption for the strip, one that I didn’t notice for a while because of a glitch that keeps it from appearing in Firefox, but which confirmed that that story was indeed the inspiration for the comic:

“Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdős!”

And since it might somehow be tangentially relevant to this post, I guess I should acknowledge that I once made out with a girl who’s had sex with Trent Reznor….