Those that can do, often are unable to teach or may not want to. They may not know why something works just that it does. It is irrelevant if a teacher built a house if the teacher can show me how. (You know all this though)
I worked for a consulting company that designed disc drives and sold a software program that simulated electronic circuits... I was hired to test one of their drives. I was the one that told them their design did not work. They did not believe me and were thinking of "terminating me and getting somebody that knows what they are doing". So I sat one of the guys down and let him fail his design... then I suggested they needed to change the bandwidth of the seek feedback to match other working designs I'd seen. Then I modified one of the drives to demonstrate my theory and it worked great... guess what, they could not fix it that easily because their circuit simulator said it would not work! I quit at that point, screw 'em all... trying to swim uphill in an environment like that sucks, I love trading, your account speaks for you regarding whether your theory and practice is working...
I agree completely. But I think that a lot of criticism of theory comes from taking the Taleb-type criticism of theory to too much of an extreme -- going from criticizing an over-reliance of models to criticizing any use of models at all. The latter is clearly unwarranted -- after all, what do you without any theory? Trade "with your gut"? Yet, it's also true that many from the schools of pure theory have proven to be abysmal money managers, blowing up over and over again, probably for many of the same reasons Taleb describes. And after blowing up, they can still raise massive amounts of cash for their next fund, owing to their reputations as theorists. But it's not "theory" itself that makes them lose so badly -- it's that all theories are imperfect (especially when it comes to finance), and that they relied on them as being far more precise and stationary than they really are. Anyhow, the "theory versus practice" debate reminds me of the "edge versus discipline/risk management" debates, which seem even more common on ET. The fact of the matter is that you need both -- without discipline and/or risk management, you blow up; without edge, you're simply churning and burning.
"The real world gives the subset of what it is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The "constraint" is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsic to the thing but are relational between observer and thing" -- W. Ross Ashby Don't confuse the map with the terrain.
Political Science is strong here: http://ptw.uchicago.edu/ It is fun going to some of the talks. nitro