There’s a class of things which feel majorly helpful, but it’s hard to distinguish between whether I was helped by the background in pure mathematics, or whether I have some characteristics which both helped me in mathematics and help me now (I suspect it’s some of both):
Being good at framing things
Turning things over in my head, looking for the angle which makes them most parsimonious, and easiest to comprehend clearly
Relatedly, feeling happy to dive in and try to make up theory, but keep it grounded by “this has to actually explain the things we want to know about”
These are useful skills when faced with domains where we haven’t yet settled on paradigms which we’re satisfied capture the important parts of what we care about
Generally keeping track of precisely what are the epistemic statuses of different claims, and how they interact
This is a useful skill for domains where we’re projecting out beyond things we can easily check empirically
Then there are some cases where I was more directly applying some mathematical thinking, e.g.:
There’s a class of things which feel majorly helpful, but it’s hard to distinguish between whether I was helped by the background in pure mathematics, or whether I have some characteristics which both helped me in mathematics and help me now (I suspect it’s some of both):
Being good at framing things
Turning things over in my head, looking for the angle which makes them most parsimonious, and easiest to comprehend clearly
Relatedly, feeling happy to dive in and try to make up theory, but keep it grounded by “this has to actually explain the things we want to know about”
These are useful skills when faced with domains where we haven’t yet settled on paradigms which we’re satisfied capture the important parts of what we care about
Generally keeping track of precisely what are the epistemic statuses of different claims, and how they interact
This is a useful skill for domains where we’re projecting out beyond things we can easily check empirically
Then there are some cases where I was more directly applying some mathematical thinking, e.g.:
Work on normative uncertainty (chiefly: variance normalization; bargaining)
Theory of logarithmic returns