Art and Science: Whose Business Are They?

About twenty years ago, my (now ex-)wife’s brother told me a story I never forgot, because it resonated so strongly with me. (I can’t recall now if the experience happened to him or if he was relaying something that happened to someone else, but for our purposes here, it doesn't really matter.) He was in Paris on holiday and was visiting the Louvre. As he filed past the Mona Lisa, he overheard the following exchange between an American married couple:

Wife: Well, honey, what do you think?

Husband: What can I say about art? I’m an engineer.

To me, a society in which its engineers do not feel entitled to an opinion about art, is a society in decline. To say that you cannot/should not have an opinion about art because you are not an artist, is like saying you can’t have an opinion about eating because you are not a chef.  Art is an essential human function, one that springs from the core of our humanity.

The same is true about the human yearning to understand the world, as expressed in our pursuit of science and exploration. Besides the fact that I recently saw this former brother-in-law*, I have also been thinking about this story of his because someone asked me why I had blogged about my visit to the Space Symposium, and specifically why I was so interested in the physics of it all. The underlying question seemed to be, “You’re an executive manager with an education in languages and business….what makes you feel qualified to question people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lisa Randall?” My answer is two-fold:

1) Logic is the underpinning of any intellectual endeavor, so any person capable of pursuing a logical line of reasoning may ask questions about any endeavor if the question addresses the logic (not facts) of the expert’s approach. In other words, no, I will never question Lisa Randall’s grasp of quarks and gluons because I am and will always be hopelessly under-qualified even to formulate an intelligent question on that subject. But can I ask a question about the philosophy of science that underpins her approach? Absolutely I can! Can I reasonably question Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s expertise in astrophysics? No. But can I question the logic behind his reasoning that the traditional NASA/publicly-funded approach to exploration must continue to be the dominate paradigm? You bet I can!

2) My second reason ends up where this thought started: not only CAN I question scientific minds about their reasoning and approaches; as an active participant in civil society, as a person interested in science and exploration as expressions of our most fundamental human nature, I MUST ask these questions.

This also harkens back to a very basic fallacy often employed in arguments: that expertise in one thing means that one may not be questioned in any area; or conversely, that ineptitude or evil in one area means one’s opinion may never be trusted in any other arena, e.g., the ‘Hitler wanted xyz, ergo xzy must be evil’ argument. Taken to their logical extremes, this means I may not question a scientist’s sanity if he tells me to jump off a building (‘trust me, I did my PhD in gravity!’), and I may assume dogs are inherently evil since Hitler seemed so fond of his.

So as long as we employ logical reasoning, we both can and should engage scientists about their research and ask the fundamental questions. But let’s circle back to the beginning: what about art? As I said, it’s everyone’s business. But then why do so few scientists seem engaged with art and vice versa? I have been thinking about this a lot of late, prompted to do so by several things. One was reading about Lisa Randall’s artistic foray (in which she wrote the libretto for an opera about science). Another reason is a conversation I just had a few days ago on my flight from Boston to Frankfurt. I was lucky enough to be seated next to an artist who just happened to be working on a project that bridges science and art**, and she mentioned her efforts to engage scientists in this way, specifically a project that would require a high level of collaboration between the two camps. (I am being intentionally vague and cagey here as she mentioned one particular project in confidence as it is still in planning phase, and I don’t want to give away anything until her efforts are public.)

But even when scientists do ‘cross over’, they seem to do so while holding their noses. I hate to keep picking on Dr. Randall, but since I am currently reading her book ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ and it provides a perfect example, I fear I must. On page 128 she notes the aesthetic beauty of the LHC, but then quickly draws back in horror at this idea as she ‘recoil[s] … in thinking of this incredibly precise technological miracle as an art project’. Why is this idea so repulsive, I wonder? What can be more beautiful than such a marvel, and one that seeks to answer many of the exact same questions art has been asking for millennia? Far from recoiling at the idea that the LHC is both art and science, this should be a chance to experience deep wonder at the beauty of the whole endeavor and the way it combines both worlds.

If you’re an artist and you’re smugly agreeing, well, hold on a sec. Artists are just as bad, if not worse. I’ll give you an example. Not long ago, a friend posed the following question on her Facebook page: If you could do a PhD in either art history or economics, which would you choose? Not surprisingly, the people who probably fancied themselves more practical chose the latter, and the more artistically-minded chose the former. But one comment in particular caught my eye. I can’t recall the exact words, but it boiled down to this: why would you choose economics over art history when economics just strips away the soul of things and reduces everything to numbers? This haughty dismissal of the beauty that can await you in the sciences (be they the social or physical sciences or mathematics) is unfortunately quite typical of artists’ reaction to all things scientific. But they are being as close-minded as the disdainful scientist in these cases. Take this specific example of economics. Economics isn’t just math and dollars and GDP. Economics is nothing less than an attempt to delve into the human soul and see what makes it tick, what drives it, what motivates people to behave the way they do. Economics is as much about quirky things like why Israeli mothers might pick up their kids from day school even later when they are fined for it, as it is about the GDP of Liechtenstein. (If you’re scratching your head at that reference, I strongly recommend you read Freakonomics, a must-read for everyone, artist, scientist, lay person alike.) Imagine all the creative possibilities artists are missing out on by being so dismissive of science, then.

So whether you are a scientist thinking about art, an artist thinking about science, or just an average Joe like me thinking about both, please remember: it’s ALL your business, and the more you engage, the better off your society will be.

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*…who by the way is a man whom I have always very deeply respected, and who is (among many, many other things), an engineer who feels quite entitled to have an opinion about art, thank you very much.

**Isn’t it funny the way the universe seems to clump these things into packages for us? A more spiritual person would say it is Fate, or even God. I would say such observations betray simple selection bias and are circular to boot, i.e., I am writing because these things happened to happen, so I can’t say they happened because I wanted to write about them. Similarly, people in a universe in which certain laws of physics had to be precisely calibrated for them to exist cannot claim this as proof of any god; it’s just proof that if things had been off, there’d be no they to consider such things.

Fun with Artificial Intelligence

I have been having a ball for the past week playing with Eureqa, an AI I mentioned in an earlier post. Eureqa is the brainchild of Profs. Schmidt and Lipson at Cornell. When it comes to data, my main fascination has always been economic data, so I have been toying with trying to find models that best account for why equities markets move in one direction or another. As I said in that previous post, there are far too many irrational factors involved in the movement of equities markets to come up with the S&P 500's answer to E=MC². Even if you managed to come up with a more or less reasonable predictive model, the theoretical economic characteristic of so-called 'perfect knowledge' eventually becomes not-so-theoretical economic reality; people begin operating under this new spotlight; next thing you know, the model is dead precisely because everyone knows about it and therefore behaves in ways not predictable by the model (since this new knowledge and resulting behavior are themselves major new variables).

Quite aside from the fact that eventual knowledge of a good model would itself make the model obsolete, is the fact that there is a HUGE difference between an equation that explains data and an equation that reveals cause and effect for data. Just ask all the people who have wasted good time and money 'data-mining' the history of equities markets. A perfect example is O'Shaughnessy's 'What Works on Wall Street'. The author dug through decades of data on the stock market and came up with elaborate models showing what would have been extremely effective ways of making money....assuming one had the knowledge of the entire period, but had gained that knowledge at the beginning of the period studied. It's amazing to me that an internet search of this man still pulls up almost universally positive, glowing articles and interviews, despite the fact that the mutual funds that he opened in the 1990s, funds entirely built on his 'research', were abject failures. He managed to spin this somehow, get out of mutual funds, and open a private wealth management company. This allowed him to continue making money and claiming he was right all along, but in fact freeing him to use completely unrelated methods of investing (since he isn't required to divulge his techniques). So he is undoubtedly a gifted marketer, and obviously even a good money manager...as long as he isn't following his own advice.

If this is all still (quite understandably) rather abstruse, I'll illustrate with a metaphor. Imagine you stand outside on the street corner and observe the weather and the passing of cars and people. Three out of ten days it rains. On those days, you notice people wearing raincoats. You also notice there are no open convertibles. Data-mining your way to 'good' equations tells you that an absence of convertibles and a presence of raincoats cause it to rain. That's an example of mixing up cause and effect. In another example, imagine that you observe that on the days it rained, you observed ten percent more people named Jane. Aha! An excess of Janes is causing rain! No, this is just coincidence.* I could go on, but for more examples of these kinds of problematic reasoning, there's a far better resource: read Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte. This book is one of my top fifteen all-time favorites, not so much because it taught me anything I didn't already know (though it did that, too), but because he so eloquently and clearly expressed ideas I had known well but that I had been unable to articulate.

However, an inability to find well-performing predictive models for equities markets, doesn't mean that feeding such data in Eureqa is itself useless. By watching how Eureqa treats all the different variables, you start to see how they interact and which ones haven't even a correlative relationship with equities market performance. For example, Eureqa rarely seems to 'care' much for inflation. There appears to be very little correlation. BUT, it does 'care' quite a lot about the Fed Funds rate, which is essentially the public policy reaction to inflation. It also 'likes' CD rates, which might be a decent stand-in for opportunity costs, though that implies some cause-and-effect (CD rates are low -> opportunity cost of foregoing them in favor of equities is low -> I will buy equities -> everyone does same -> equity prices rise)**, which requires a heavier burden of proof, one that I am far from meeting. And employment? Almost always tosses that out as irrelevant very quickly. But it 'loves' consumer confidence, which suggests that while the markets don't 'care'*** about how many people are out of work, they care very much about how confident people feel in the economy (which is presumably in turn driven by how many of them have jobs, though not directly). But again, there is no straight cause-and-effect here. You can't say Consumer Confidence = y ergo stock performance will = z as an exact function of y.

Early days yet, but so far, so fun! After I get bored with this round of experiments, I think I'll move on to GDP.
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Footnotes:

*Don't even get me started on people who say 'I don't believe in coincidences.' Do you have ANY idea what kind of universe we would live in WITHOUT A HUGE LOT OF COINCIDENCES? Randomness permeates the very fabric of existence. The 'problem' is that our human brains have evolved with this incessant need to find patterns. I say this facetiously because of course that very same 'problem' is doubtless one of the very core elements of our intelligence, not to mention a key explanation to our very survival as a species. But it does have the unfortunate side-effect of making us see Jesus in breakfast food far too often.

**This introduces an intriguing interplay itself. Perhaps the opportunity cost (in form of CD rates or T-bills) must reach a certain threshold before prompting consideration of equities, but that consideration is in turn colored by the confidence one has in the markets and the overall economy (as measured by U of M consumer confidence index?), and that interplay in turn drives the degree to which investors commit to equities, thus determining the demand for (and therefore value of) those equities. Add in a dash of price-to-earnings data (i.e., the 'real' cost of 'buying' the earnings behind an equity) and you might just have some soup worth tasting.

***Please forgive the anthropomorphic words here. And if you are a lefty like me, do not fall into the temptation of attributing 'feelings' to markets. That a market does not move in reaction to a tragedy like high unemployment, does NOT mean that the people who make up those markets do not care about unemployed people. The phenomenon is merely an observed outcome of the aggregate behavior of the people acting in the market, not the 'evil' intent of any group of people within the market. I enjoy demonizing Wall St fat-cats as much as the next liberal, but do so for their individual behaviors, not those of the markets in which they act.