The Tyranny of Abstractions

The Tyranny of Power

When I began my career in medical statistics, back in 1972, little was heard of power calculations. In major journals, sample size often appeared to be whatever came to hand. For example, in that month, September 1972, the Lancet contained 31 research reports which used individual subject data, excluding case reports and animal studies. The median sample size was 33 (quartiles 12 and 85). In th...

The Tyranny of Inequality

When parties are very unequally endowed, agreement may be very difficult to reach, even if the specific transaction is easy to contract on, and fungible resources can be transferred to compensate the losing party. The very fungibility of the resource transferred makes it hard to restrict its use, changing the amount the parties involved spend in trying to grab future rents. This spill-over effe...

The Tyranny of Geography

When Matt’s job search reached its third year, his family became convinced that his studying computer science in college was a mistake. “If computer science is such a good thing to study,” his grandmother sni ed, “why can’t it get him a job?” I wasn’t an intimate friend of Matt’s, but as his neighbor, I’d seen him grow from toddler to teenager to tech geek. As a gesture to the family, I o ered ...

The Tyranny of Embodiment

The Tyranny of Scales

This paper examines a fundamental problem in applied mathematics. How can one model the behavior of materials that display radically different, dominant behaviors at different length scales. Although we have good models for material behaviors at small and large scales, it is often hard to relate these scale-based models to one another. Macroscale models represent the integrated effects of very ...