In which I provide a loose translation of Jensen’s 1906 “Inequality” paper from the original French.
by Sam L. Savage
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has put many people out of work, a number of people I know find themselves busier than ever. I am blessed to be in the latter category and my heart goes out to those in the former. Thank you Thomas Paine, Milton Friedman, and Andrew Yang for the continuing dialog on Universal Basic Income. I hope those checks start arriving soon.
Why are the rest of us so busy? Here are some anecdotal explanations heard from friends. “I no longer commute.” “I used to leave work at the office, but now I wake up and start working and the next thing I know it’s 10PM.” “Our Zoom meetings aren’t as effective as face to face discussion, so everything takes longer.” “The university has just switched to totally online teaching without warning and there are tremendous setup issues.”
In my case the transition was easy. I have worked from home since 1997 and am used to filling up 16 hours a day with procrastination and a little work. I have stayed up to speed on teleconferencing technology and had already been teaching some of my Stanford classes via Zoom. The worst thing so far has been the closing of the beloved YMCA, 300 steps from my house, which I used to visit twice a day.
So why am I so busy? Recall that I am the primary publicist for Jensen’s Inequality, (which I have rebranded as the strong form of the Flaw of Averages). There is a link below to Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen’s original 1906 paper from Acta Mathematica. If you can’t read mathematics and French at the same time, I have provided a loose translation below.
Loose translation of Jensen’s 1906 paper:
Sur les fonctions convexes et les inégalités entre les valeurs moyennes
Seventy-six years from now when they invent electronic spreadsheets, most people will be uncertain about the numbers they are plugging in, so they will just enter the average values. And a majority of those dumbasses won’t have a clue that the numbers coming out are generally not the average outputs.
And by the way, there are no exemptions during pandemics when the extra uncertainty only accentuates this problem. So remember, boys and girls, my inequality works 24/7, 365 days a year, rewarding options traders and others who thrive on uncertainty, and punishing those who insist on basing decisions on single average numbers.
Jensen must be turning over in his grave to see a billion people ignoring his advice today. But where was I?
Oh yes. As Jensen predicted in 1906, one reason I’m so busy is that the pandemic has created a target-rich environment for his famous inequality. But on top of that, this is the perfect time to finally push out the second edition of my book on the Flaw of Averages. So to create extra time in my day, and maintain my exercise routine, I constructed the CVWP (cardio-vascular word processor) out of spare parts, pictured above. You might think it would be hard to type and spin at the same time. First of all, as it turns out, a lot of what I am doing at this stage is proofreading, which has led to an interesting discovery. I am a slow reader, but if type something like this, leaving out the word “I,” by using Microsoft Word’s Read Aloud function, I can proofread quickly with a part of the brain that was not guilty of the original typo, all the while spinning my heart out. When I do find a problem, I slow up a bit and have plenty of keyboard bandwidth to fix it with redlines on. For the real diehards, the Dictation feature allows you to speak into Word as well, but I am not yet fully proficient at that.
For those interested in updates to the book, you may visit FlawOfAverages.com to explore some new material. In particular there is a link to over 20 annotated SIPmath models in Excel covering a wide range of applications.
Copyright © 2020 Sam L. Savage