Soklakov Andrei N
Strategic Development, Deutsche Bank, Hong Kong.
Entropy (Basel). 2020 Aug 3;22(8):860. doi: 10.3390/e22080860.
Disagreement is an essential element of science and life in general. The language of probabilities and statistics is often used to describe disagreements quantitatively. In practice, however, we want much more than that. We want disagreements to be resolved. This leaves us with a substantial knowledge gap, which is often perceived as a lack of practical intuition regarding probabilistic and statistical concepts. Here, we propose to address disagreements using the methods of financial economics. In particular, we show how a large class of disagreements can be transformed into investment opportunities. The expected financial performance of such investments quantifies the amount of disagreement in a tangible way. This provides intuition for statistical concepts such as the Rényi divergence, which becomes connected to the financial performance of optimized investments. Investment optimization takes into account individual opinions as well as attitudes towards risk. The result is a market-like social mechanism by which funds flow naturally to support a more accurate view. Such social mechanisms can help us with difficult disagreements (e.g., financial arguments concerning the future climate). In terms of scientific validation, we used the findings of independent neurophysiological experiments as well as our own research on the equity premium.
分歧是科学乃至一般生活中的一个基本要素。概率和统计学语言常被用于定量描述分歧。然而在实践中，我们想要的远不止于此。我们希望分歧得到解决。这给我们留下了一个巨大的知识空白，人们常常将其视为缺乏关于概率和统计概念的实际直觉。在此，我们提议运用金融经济学方法来处理分歧。具体而言，我们展示了如何将一大类分歧转化为投资机会。此类投资的预期财务表现以一种切实的方式量化了分歧的程度。这为诸如雷尼散度等统计概念提供了直觉理解，雷尼散度与优化投资的财务表现相关联。投资优化考虑了个人观点以及对风险的态度。结果是形成了一种类似市场的社会机制，资金会自然流动以支持更准确的观点。这种社会机制能够帮助我们处理棘手的分歧（例如，关于未来气候的金融争论）。在科学验证方面，我们采用了独立神经生理学实验的结果以及我们自己关于股权溢价的研究。
