Or: Against media hype

A recent article from David Hill titled “Does Being White Make Me a Worse Doctor for Black Children?” was published on BeingWell — A Medium publication for which I am an author. I found myself disagreeing with the conclusions of Dr. Hill and felt I should articulate my position on a platform that doesn’t limit me to 280 characters.

Before moving on, I strongly recommend reading Dr. Hill’s article so you know for yourself if I’m making a good-faith characterization of his arguments. You can find the article below:

A central point of Dr. Hill’s article is based on a recent PNAS paper titled “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”. I don’t like academic jargon, so I’ll simplify the title a bit for you: “Do infants have better survival rates when birthed by a doctor of the same race?” The conclusions in this article are pretty stunning. If the authors are to be believed, black infants were 58% more likely to survive when their doctors were also black instead of white. This is a crazy result, and if true, would have disturbing implications — how many black babies have died unnecessarily as a result of poor racial concordance? …

Or: Why I Hate Business Books

Why is every business book so awful? No, really, why are they so consistently bad? I’m a binge reader, and this past week alone I’ve been reading somewhere between 2 and 3 books a day — the one constant in this endeavour is that books about business are consistently terrible.

But before I do that, I’d like to break down the standard format of a business book — its contents, its structure, and what the raison d’être of most books in this genre seems to be.

The Anatomy of a Business Book

The experts are wrong. What gets passed down from experts to the modern businessman is less wisdom and more discarded, malformed chunks of knowledge that don’t accurately reflect the reality of running a business. …

Or: Taking your beliefs to their logical conclusion

There’s a concept in philosophy known as the “utility monster”. The basic idea is that there may exist an agent that derives an incalculably large amount of utility from any given unit of resources than all of humanity does. Robert Nozick proposed the utility monster as part of his critique of utilitarianism, which is the ethical theory that (roughly) claims we should seek the greatest good for the greatest number of people. …

I’d like to introduce a concept I’ve found useful when thinking about the scientific community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Gell-Mann Amnesia.

I think we’ve all experienced Gell-Mann amnesia in some form before. Here’s how Michael Crichton, who coined the term, describes it:

“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. …

Or: Good epistemic hygiene is important

In an 1877 paper, Cambridge mathematician and philosopher William Clifford describes the case of a shipowner about to make a sale:

“A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.” …

And may not do what we want them to do

A couple weeks ago the American Justice Department found that Yale systematically discriminates against Asian and White applicants on the basis of their race. Relative to Black applicants of similar qualifications, Asians and Whites are 90% and 75% less likely to get in, respectively.

This isn’t new — Harvard was recently caught up in another race-based admissions scandal where it was found to artificially “cap” the number of asian students they admit. While the school cannot legally institute a quota, the plaintiffs in the legal case contend that the school systemically downgraded Asian students in its “personality rating” — Asian students were consistently determined to have blander personalities than similarly-qualified applicants. …

Or: Low frequency events with high impact are difficult to think about

Blaise Pascal, a 17th century philosopher and mathematician was struggling with faith. How could he convince himself, and others, to believe in God? In an early application of decision theory, he proposed that having faith was akin to a wager, a bet, a game of chance. His end conclusion was that, regardless of whether the existence of God is supported by one’s personal standard of evidence, it is still better to have faith:

“Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” …

Or: I’d rather gargle nails than hear the word “utilize” again

It’s good to take a break from writing serious, long-form posts. I’ve been doing a lot of book and paper reviews recently and feel the urge to do something a little more light-hearted.

A bit about my background first: I started off in an undergraduate philosophy program at the University of Waterloo before moving on to the HBA program at the Ivey School of Business. Many of the students in the HBA program were AEO — advanced entry students who knew they were going to Ivey —whereas I came in with virtually no knowledge of business. …