I had the urge the walk out of a class once, Philosophy 130, about a decade ago. Professor Petrik began the class by saying that he was trying a new system of grading. Everyone’s contribution on tests and papers would be combined into a communal pool, and that at the end of the semester, everyone in the class would be getting the same grade based on this pool.
While I was too nervous/shy to actually walk out, I was planning to go straight to the registrar’s office to drop the class (this was before online registration). The class spent the next 15 minutes listing all the reasons he shouldn’t use such a system. Pretending as though we had convinced him, he said he’d use the traditional individual system, and I no longer felt the need to drop the class. [Update: The moral of the story was that this is why we need philosophy.]
Staying in that class was one of the best academic decisions I made. Professor Petrik was the best teacher I’ve ever had. Not only did I try to model my own classes after his when I started teaching, but I also pilfered, close to verbatim, his amazing explanation of the difference between subjective and objective involving Twinkies, orange juice, and hot tubs.
My heartfelt thanks and appreciation goes out to Professor James Petrik.
Now, back to business. What spurred me to write this was a post by Barry Ritholtz about walking out of a class. Let me begin by saying that I’ve been reading Ritholtz for awhile, and credit (and cite) this post of his for providing a key insight for this study of mine. Having said that, I was taken aback upon reading this story.
Rithholtz:
I signed up for (amongst other courses) Economics 101.Perhaps I’m hopelessly biased and am just trying to salvage the better part of a decade that I spent studying the subject, but I’m shocked by this. I’m shocked not that an 18-22 year old could write off an entire field of study after 10 minutes, but rather, that looking back on this however many years later, he still thought this was the correct decision.
It took all of ten minutes into the first class for me to recoil in horror. I asked the prof: “What do you meant that humans are rational? That is obviously not true. How important is this idea to economics?”
The response was, in hindsight, not a surprise: “It is the fundamental building block for all of economics. If you fight that underlying concept, if you do not provisionally accept that premise, you will not be able to understand what comes later.”
So I made what turned out to be one of my very best academic decisions: I gathered my books and walked out the door, and dropped the class.
To begin with, it should have occurred to him by now that the context/definition of a word matters. What an economist means by “rational” in an economics class is not necessarily the same thing as its everyday usage implies. Had he stayed for more than 10 minutes, he would have found out that when an economist uses the term rational, he means
This is a bit too detailed of an explanation to get into on the first day, so it often gets boiled down to “people are rational.”Does it say that people aren’t stupid at times and always make the right decisions? No. But that is an entirely different question than whether the preferences that lead them to make such decisions fit the economist’s definition of rationality. After all, I’m arguing that Ritholtz made a mistake walking out of the class, which, if I’m correct, people who don’t understand what I’ve just said will think proves that people aren’t rational.
By way of comparison, imagine that I said the following:
I signed up for (amongst other courses) Political Science 101.I think pretty much everyone would see that my reasoning was badly flawed. You will never learn the definitions, or all of the caveats and exceptions to the ideas being discussed in any class, and certainly not in the first 10 minutes of an intro level class. Why anyone would think that you would, or that words can’t have different meanings in different contexts, is somewhat of a mystery to me.
It took all of ten minutes into the first class for me to recoil in horror. I asked the prof: “What do you meant that people vote? That is obviously not true. People under 18 can’t vote. People convicted of felonies can’t vote. Even those who are allowed to vote often don’t. How important is this idea to democracy?”
The response was, in hindsight, not a surprise: “It is the fundamental building block for all of political science. If you fight that underlying concept, if you do not provisionally accept that premise, you will not be able to understand what comes later.”
So I made what turned out to be one of my very best academic decisions: I gathered my books and walked out the door, and dropped the class.
3 comments:
Point well made Andrew. Decision making is a science unto itself. The person you cite in your blog has to live with his decision. And it sure isn't something to brag about.
I would just like to add that this sort of action, void of thought, is not as uncommon as some might believe. In addition, if I were the professor of the class that this guy walked out of, I would be pleased.
You make many unwarranted assumptions -- thats something a person who studies decision-making may wish to reconsider.
The rest of my story -- after walking out of econ 101 -- involves finishing college, going to law school, and eventually working on Wall St.
To be blunt, my lack of a formal education in Economics was an advantage. Faulty Economic dogma lay at the heart of the recent crisis we just went through.
I started as a trader, questioned most of the heuristics and myths that pass for Financial wisdom. I eventually moved to the research side.
If you want the full story, you can read more here: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/barry-ritholtz-curriculum-vitae/
But I am pretty confident in saying that had I stayed in that Econ 101 class -- or if I accepted the dogma as manna from heaven -- whatever professional success I have achieved most likely never would have happened (at least in anything financial/economics related.
i cannot say that it true for everyone, but not accepting what turned out to be a terribly flawed, and sometimes damaging belief system was the right decision for me.
Ritholtz,
I don’t doubt that your career as a trader wouldn’t have benefited from econ classes for two reasons. One, econ typically assumes away most of what financial markets really do. The guy who taught me financial economics came from a successful career doing real finance, and told us something along the lines of “My first day, the boss comes up and says ‘You economists think that markets are efficient and that there are therefore no opportunities for arbitrage. What you fail to realize is that markets are only efficient after I’m done with them.’”
Second, it’s possible that you’re right that econ is useless. My only response is to paraphrase Churchill and say that economics is the worst tool for studying decision making, except for all the others.
But unless you know both that you’re going to be a trader and that econ is bunk, than walking out of that class was a mistake given what you knew at the time, even if it was correct in hindsight. By analogy, if I bought back into the market in March 09 because my magic 8-ball told me to, I would have made a mistake given what I knew at the time, though in hindsight it would have been a great move.
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