Contemporaneous, Independent, and Complementary

You've probably been in a situation where you and someone else discovered something "contemporaneously and independently". Despite the initial sinking feeling, I've come to realize that there's usually nothing to worry about. 

First, normal-time science has a certain internal momentum -- it simply must evolve in certain ways -- so people often identify and pluck the low-hanging fruit more-or-less simultaneously. 

Second, and crucially, such incidents are usually not just the same discovery made twice. Rather, although intimately-related, the two contributions usually differ in subtle but important ways, rendering them complements, not substitutes.

Here's a good recent example in financial econometrics, working out asymptotics for high-frequency high-dimensional factor models. On the one hand, consider Pelger, and on the other hand consider Ait-Sahalia and Xiu.  There's plenty of room in the world for both, and the whole is even greater than the sum of the (individually-impressive) parts.

Listening to Your Sentences, II

Here's a continuation of this recent post (for students) on listening to writing.

OK, you say, Martin Amis interviews are entertaining, but Martin Amis is not a mere mortal, so what's the practical writing advice for the rest of us? Read this, from Gary Provost (evidently the highlighting is keyed to different sentence lengths):

Martin Amis on How to Write a Great Sentence

It's been a while since I did a piece on good writing, for students.   In an old post I said "Listen to your words; push your prose toward poetry."  That's perhaps a bit much -- you don't need to write poetry, but you do need to listen to your writing. 

On the listening theme, check out this Martin Amis clip, even if I don't see why you shouldn't repeat prefixes or suffixes in the same sentence (in fact I think the repetition can sometimes be poetic, a sort of alliteration, when done tastefully).  And while you're at it, take a look at this marvelous older clip too.

Student Advice III: Succeeding in Academia

Lasse Pedersen's advice is wonderful. Study it. Of course there's something or another for everyone to quibble with. My pet quibble is that it's rather long. Lasse correctly suggests roughly twenty pages for a ninety minute talk, so presumably this slide deck is for a talk approaching three hours. But who cares? Study it, carefully. (And thanks to Glenn Rudebusch for calling it to my attention.)

Student Advice II: How to Give a Seminar

Check out Jesse Shapiro's view. He calls it "How to Give an Applied Micro Talk," but it's basically relevant everywhere. Of course reasonable people might quibble with a few things said, or regret the absence of a few things unsaid, but overall it's apt and witty. I love the "No pressure though" (you'll have to find it for yourself).

Student Advice I: Some Good Reading for Good Writing (and Good Graphics)

                            

Good writing is good thinking, so when you next hear some pretentious moron boast that ``I don't like to write, I like to think," rest assured, he's surely a bad writer and a bad thinker. Again, good writing is good thinking. If you like "to do research" but don't like "to write it up," then you're not thinking clearly. Research and writing are inextricably intertwined.

How to get there? Read and absorb McCloskey's Rhetoric of Economics, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style. There's no real need to read or absorb much else (about writing). But do bolt the Chicago Manual of Style to your desk. Then get going. Think about what you want to say, why, and to whom. Think hard and critically about logical structure and flow, at all scales, small and large. Revise and edit, again and again. Make things easy for your readers.  Listen to your words; push your prose toward poetry. 

Good graphics is also good thinking, and precisely the same advice holds. Read and absorb Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Notice, by the way, how well Tufte writes (even if he sometimes goes overboard with the poetry thing). It's no accident. As Tufte says: show the data, and appeal to the viewer. Recognize that your first cut using default software settings will never, ever, be satisfactory. (If that statement doesn't instantly resonate with you, then you're in desperate need of a Tufte infusion.) So revise and edit, again and again. And again.