How not to get published by Jonny Blamey
Some time ago I promised to send my two envelope solution to a journal and post the referees reports on this blog. Here’s the whole story
Last May I gave a talk at a conference and someone told me afterwards that he thought my thesis would have some bearing on the Two Envelope paradox. I saw the solution straight away. Using Ramsey’s measure for degree of belief, the paradox becomes a simple disagreement in probability assignments. I was looking for a problem with which to demonstrate my new techniques in decision theory and here was one that fell into my lap.
I put my solution on the blog and received a huge amount of negative comments. As one of the labels was “rigid designator” I got one comment saying that I obviously didn’t understand the two envelope paradox since “rigid designator” was irrelevant to the problem. I got some other comments along the lines that I didn’t understand probability, maths, philosophy, the principle of indifference, Bayes theorem, the nature of argument and anything at all. My lack of knowledge is on Socratic proportions.
At another conference I met someone who had published work on the two envelope paradox. Friends with him was Sorin Bangu who gave a talk on the principle of indifference. I asked Dr Bangu to post on Bloggin the question. By November an article came out in Mind on the two envelope paradox using the concept of rigid designation by a pair of scholars from Dr Bangu’s university. Does this make my use of rigid designation retro actively valid?
Meanwhile someone on the blog challenged me to send my solution to a journal, specifically the BJPS and when it was rejected, to publish the referees reports on the blog. Instead of a flat rejection the BJPS asked me to rewrite in response to the referees reports. The referees reports said my solution was an ingenious contribution to the literature, but had a flaw. If I could respond to the comments they would consider publishing.
This I did, but in response to something that David Papineau said I was working on trying to express the solution in more natural terms. My Dad came over to visit and we spent an afternoon drawing graphs of possible pairs of envelopes, pigs, people etc. who fit the description. We found that the more densely packed and widely spread the envelopes, the more closely the graph fits 1/x for the sum of the pair and 1/SQRx for the second envelope given the first. If you normalise this then for any N you can show that the probability that swapping will double your money is 1/3. What no one in the literature had grasped was that the envelopes necessarily come in pairs. Once you accept this fact it is possible to find the probability distribution. It was assumed in the literature that you can have any prior probability distribution you like, which is absurd. Why should you act on an arbitrary probability distribution? And how can the probability that an envelope contains 2x P(2x) be greater than P(4x) + P(x)? And if you accept two end points below and above which there can be no envelope, then an equal distribution is impossible. P(2x, x) = 1/3 and P(1/2x, x) = 2/3 is the only pair of conditionals that works.
I tried to put this into easy accessible language and resubmitted to the BJPS. They were late coming back to me, saying that they had to wait ‘til after Christmas for one referee. Finally on my birthday they sent me a rejection with only an extract from one referee’s report.
Begin Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------Sorry to be a bit slow on this. I have read the paper, and don't think it's really good enough to recommend. There is an interesting central idea, but (a) the paper has too much irrelevant detail in the first six pages and (b) I don't think the main contention of the paper is strongly enough supported. There are also some minor (but distracting) inaccuracies.----------------------------------------------------------End Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------
I asked them to sent me the full reports, and they said they would, but it turned out that one referees report was lost and the other referee did not want his comments exposed to judgement.
Meanwhile I sent off a really accessible version for the Jacobsen essay prize and did get to see some of the examiners reports from that one. So I’ll paste those below as a substitute.
EXAMINERS REPORTS
3. Envelope stall.
This short essay simply presents a well-known ‘paradox’. No references are given and there is nothing original said about the issues that it raises.
I expected to warm most to essay 3. But, aside from the fact that it makes no reference at all to the literature, and the fact that the answer surely (at least partly) lies in the fact that no one could really think, in anything like a real situation, that there is a uniform prior over all possible pay-offs (s/he assumes this away), I just couldn't see what basis there was for what seems to be the crucial premise namely the distinction between probabilistic and 'financial' terms (p.3).
3. Sam’s Envelope Stall
Lively, but the suggested solution is not cogent. And this is a topic on which there is a huge and sophisticated literature which the author simply ignores.
END
I hope this story is useful to those researchers hoping to get published.
Last May I gave a talk at a conference and someone told me afterwards that he thought my thesis would have some bearing on the Two Envelope paradox. I saw the solution straight away. Using Ramsey’s measure for degree of belief, the paradox becomes a simple disagreement in probability assignments. I was looking for a problem with which to demonstrate my new techniques in decision theory and here was one that fell into my lap.
I put my solution on the blog and received a huge amount of negative comments. As one of the labels was “rigid designator” I got one comment saying that I obviously didn’t understand the two envelope paradox since “rigid designator” was irrelevant to the problem. I got some other comments along the lines that I didn’t understand probability, maths, philosophy, the principle of indifference, Bayes theorem, the nature of argument and anything at all. My lack of knowledge is on Socratic proportions.
At another conference I met someone who had published work on the two envelope paradox. Friends with him was Sorin Bangu who gave a talk on the principle of indifference. I asked Dr Bangu to post on Bloggin the question. By November an article came out in Mind on the two envelope paradox using the concept of rigid designation by a pair of scholars from Dr Bangu’s university. Does this make my use of rigid designation retro actively valid?
Meanwhile someone on the blog challenged me to send my solution to a journal, specifically the BJPS and when it was rejected, to publish the referees reports on the blog. Instead of a flat rejection the BJPS asked me to rewrite in response to the referees reports. The referees reports said my solution was an ingenious contribution to the literature, but had a flaw. If I could respond to the comments they would consider publishing.
This I did, but in response to something that David Papineau said I was working on trying to express the solution in more natural terms. My Dad came over to visit and we spent an afternoon drawing graphs of possible pairs of envelopes, pigs, people etc. who fit the description. We found that the more densely packed and widely spread the envelopes, the more closely the graph fits 1/x for the sum of the pair and 1/SQRx for the second envelope given the first. If you normalise this then for any N you can show that the probability that swapping will double your money is 1/3. What no one in the literature had grasped was that the envelopes necessarily come in pairs. Once you accept this fact it is possible to find the probability distribution. It was assumed in the literature that you can have any prior probability distribution you like, which is absurd. Why should you act on an arbitrary probability distribution? And how can the probability that an envelope contains 2x P(2x) be greater than P(4x) + P(x)? And if you accept two end points below and above which there can be no envelope, then an equal distribution is impossible. P(2x, x) = 1/3 and P(1/2x, x) = 2/3 is the only pair of conditionals that works.
I tried to put this into easy accessible language and resubmitted to the BJPS. They were late coming back to me, saying that they had to wait ‘til after Christmas for one referee. Finally on my birthday they sent me a rejection with only an extract from one referee’s report.
Begin Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------Sorry to be a bit slow on this. I have read the paper, and don't think it's really good enough to recommend. There is an interesting central idea, but (a) the paper has too much irrelevant detail in the first six pages and (b) I don't think the main contention of the paper is strongly enough supported. There are also some minor (but distracting) inaccuracies.----------------------------------------------------------End Quoted Text----------------------------------------------------------
I asked them to sent me the full reports, and they said they would, but it turned out that one referees report was lost and the other referee did not want his comments exposed to judgement.
Meanwhile I sent off a really accessible version for the Jacobsen essay prize and did get to see some of the examiners reports from that one. So I’ll paste those below as a substitute.
EXAMINERS REPORTS
3. Envelope stall.
This short essay simply presents a well-known ‘paradox’. No references are given and there is nothing original said about the issues that it raises.
I expected to warm most to essay 3. But, aside from the fact that it makes no reference at all to the literature, and the fact that the answer surely (at least partly) lies in the fact that no one could really think, in anything like a real situation, that there is a uniform prior over all possible pay-offs (s/he assumes this away), I just couldn't see what basis there was for what seems to be the crucial premise namely the distinction between probabilistic and 'financial' terms (p.3).
3. Sam’s Envelope Stall
Lively, but the suggested solution is not cogent. And this is a topic on which there is a huge and sophisticated literature which the author simply ignores.
END
I hope this story is useful to those researchers hoping to get published.
Labels: literature, publishing, references
posted by bloggin the Question at 9:45 AM
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