I maintain that if one does not perform the calculation themselves at some point, the output will be meaningless.
Unfortunately, what you say may be ultimately true, but impractical. It might also miss the mark.
In the early part of my career, much of what I did was involved with multivariate statistics. Virtually none of my anthropological colleagues who used these tools had a glimmer of an idea of the math underneath ... and I have a few funny/scary stories to illustrate the perils of a lack of understanding. But, there were those, most notably W.W. Howells, who pioneered the use of many of these techniques, who had a good intuitive sense of what the tools were doing and, perhaps more to the point, the wisdom to use the tool only as a source of insight to underlying biological realities, i.e., they didn't believe the tool on its own until the could explain the results in terms that made good biological sense.
I think that investors are in a similar position. Clearly, understanding the math or the accounting or whatever is essential if one wants to speak with authority, but many people simply don't have the background. If their intuition is good and they remember to treat the results with skepticism unless the results point them to an explanation which makes sense on more fundamental grounds, then I think there is a role for non-understood mathematical tools as part of the screening process. |
