How Smart is Smart?
By ET
I guess more than in any other profession, in academia, being smart is very important.
This is true in many senses. First of all, without being smart, it is very hard to survive. There are only these many top journals, and there are so many equally smart people competing for the few locations of publication quota. It is often believed that quarterly journals are of higher quality in general, I have no question about that, this is something typical in the business world: when you want to differentiate yourself from other, limit the supply!
Second, people need to look smart in this profession. In addition to being researchers, we are often professors, and this scary title determines that we need to be the most professional, maybe more professional than the professionals. After all, we train the professionals.
These two factors might explain why we see some arrogant people in the academia. When I was on the job market, I met an assistant professor in an interview. He wrote some nice papers in my area, and I really looked forward to meet him. His first sentence to me was: “Why did not you quote my paper in your paper?” I thought it was a joke, so I joked: “because your papers are so seminal, we don’t really quote Pigou, Hayek these days, right?” The real reason was that his papers were not quite relevant to that particular paper of mine. He then asked about my research topics, and after listening for two to three sentences, he would say: “that is wrong, since you did not consider such and such.” My response was: “I did not really have time to explain the details, and I did consider these minor issues.” For one particular paper, he said instead of using your proposed mechanism, you can as well use this mechanism… I did not want to bother telling him that I was looking at a society’s social welfare point of view (instead of a firm’s view as his suggestion is related), so I simply said:”thank you for your suggestion, I’ll think about it when I go back.” Then he stopped me:”No, this is my idea, and you don’t have permission to use my idea in your paper.” I was speechless.
Talking about being smart in academia, no other fields can compare with Physics and Mathematics. I personally worship many of the great economists, but aggregately as a discipline, Economics is not comparable with these two, not yet. In Physics, we can’t avoid mentioning Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman. In a recent post on “cosmic variance“, it is discussed how this “Feynman-Einstein-Hawking smart” can drive away many smart people from doing physics. It is suggested that there are three possible ways to exit physics: 1) be F-E-H smart, 2) pretend to be F-E-H smart, and 3) drop out. While it is not impossible to be F-E-H smart, I’m sure these people represent only a small portion of people we see everyday. [ I remember my advisor Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson's (himself a super smart person) comment on Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas:"Bertsimas is probably the smartest guy on the east part of the MIT campus." I took his class Optimization, and liked his way of teaching. Then I read some of his papers, and books. It was totally impressive. There were many many smart people in the Economics department at MIT: Frank Fisher, Bengt Holmstrom, Jerry Hausman, Jean Tirole, Susan Athey, Paul Milgrom, etc. (I do not list Peter Diamond, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson because I have not taken their classes.) They may not be F-E-H smart, but they are truly outstanding. For the rest of us, only two ways are left, you decide for yourself.
In terms of research, following Erik's advice, I choose to work on big issues at this stage. Instead of writing trashy quick papers to publish on borderline journals, I try to do something significant, in the end, at least I would have enjoyed the process.
In terms of personality, I had an interesting discussion with my colleague Sean. We observe that smart guys in our field are usually nicer than others. We tried to figure out the direction of causality: whether being smart is responsible for being nice, or vice versa. My take on this? A mean person can never truly be a master.
Let me end this long and messy story with a story, about Einstein and Hilbert.
Einstein was quite weak with mathematics (”weak” for the unbelievable work he has done, not weak as in “weak with mathematics”). Invited by great mathematician David Hilbert, he visited University of Gottingen and reported his research to people there. After a few weeks, Hilbert solved the famous field equations of general relativity, later to be called Einstein Field Equations. When people tried to persuade Hilbert to claim credit for the equations, he replied:”although the kids on the Gottingen streets know more than Einstein about solving equations, Einstein is the one discovered the theory of relativity.”
August 30th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
A certification logo of (CA) should be put on all these people’s name cards.
August 24th, 2007 at 10:32 am
I enjoy reading “How smart is smart?” I had several years’ experiences dealing/interacting/working with such “arrogant people”. (It is highly possible that we are chatting on the same “arrogant people” in the same institution.) Following the conceptualization framework from the wonderful book“The No Asshole Rule”, we should categorize these “arrogant people” as “certified assholes”.
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Thanks for the comments Alan. Many people become more humble when they meet the true mastros. They just shine and overshadow and dwarf others. My mentor Prof. John Little is such a person. His contribution in marketing makes him to be considered a founding father of quantitative marketing, and I was shocked to learn that the Little’s law in queueing theory was named after him. He never mentions these in our meetings. We are really lucky and privileged to have advisors like them. They may or may not be E-F-H smart, but they have deep influences to people like us and make us to be better individuals in the end.
Little’s Law:
The average number of customers in a stable system (over some time interval), N, is equal to their average arrival rate, λ, multiplied by their average time in the system, T, or:
[tex]N= \lambda T. [/tex]
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:38 am
David Hilbert is said to be the last human genius in the sense that he knew and was very good at math, physics and chemistry. It was very interesting to read this post. I guess being smart and being a genius are quite different. My advisor once said, “geniuses, there are only a few of them, and when you see them, you know. I’ve met a couple of them so far, only a couple. Even most of the professors at MIT, they are good, but they are not geniuses.” (He seemed to be very much troubled by those few geniuses while he was at MIT, and hence took a whole year off of math and spent that year on reading the western classics ranging from Homer to Nietzsche. Later, he got over his ego, and realized that although he was not a genius, at least he enjoyed the process of finding things out, and so he went back and finished his phd in 3 years.) He was very nice though.