The Formula That Made Everything Clear

I was doing some research for an article a few days ago and I came across some papers that were explaining different aspects of pay-per-action models and contextual advertising  and things like this. And at one point it struck me how much math was in there. Formulas here and there and model X and Y explaining problem Z. Models for explaining how advertisers bid in an auction how publishers make the auction and so on and so forth.

Although I respect very much people who have the gift to see mathematical relationships in every aspect of life, I must say – come on people, take a brake, go pet the dog or something, look out the window. It doesn’t even matter what they were trying to prove in that article, the idea is that too many are forgetting that modern economics was built by guys like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. Smith was  philosopher! If you need to turn to science for explaining at how people are bidding in an ad auction look at psychology first, not math. You are talking about people. Model their behaviour as much as you like that still won’t make you understand things completely.

My take is that among academia too many people are so busy of building “something new”, some “new model” that too easily people jump into making their own little mathematical model that no one understands because it’s new and it will get published. I don’t say these are not useful sometimes but economics and anything else that has to deal with humans is Powered by the People™.  If you want to find out what effect a badly designed pop-up has on a sites users look at any talk show. Pop-ups are like that annoying guy that doesn’t let anybody else talk. Pop-ups are interruptions that don’t let you do what you came for. Wasn’t that easy? And I figured that out without building a mathematical model for it.