“我得到过的最好建议”精选集

经济学家，作家

    1960年当我进入芝加哥大学（the University of Chicago）时，我接触到了一些进行新兴金融研究的教授。那时金融还算不上是一门学科，正在诞生之中，而我恰巧就到了它正在诞生的地方。因此，我有点着迷，当时学校里每个人都感兴趣。

    第一年，我学了门中级统计，授课教授是哈瑞·罗伯茨。当时我21岁。他和我很像——他喜欢一切体育运动，是位跑步健将。我在本科时做过很多统计工作，早就在和数据打交道。因此当我开始学时，就比其他人领先了很多。但我从哈瑞那里学到的是理念。他教给我的是对统计的态度，直到现在我也还是坚持这样的态度。

    正统的统计学是给出一个假设，然后检验。哈瑞总是说，你的标准不应该是接受、还是否决这个假设，而是能从数据中了解到什么。最好是能用这些数据强化你对世界的描述。这一直是我研究的指导明灯。应该利用市场数据更好地了解市场，而不是说这个或那个假设是真是假。没有一个模型是严格意义上正确的。真正的标准应该是：当我完成时，是比刚开始时更了解市场了吗？我当老师的49年来，我也一直把哈瑞的建议教给学生们。

Eugene Fama

Economist, author

    When I came to the University of Chicago in 1960, I was exposed to professors who were involved in the nascent subject of finance, which didn't exist as a discipline at the time. It was all being born, and it just happened that I had come to the place where that birth was happening. So I kind of got into it because everybody there was interested in it.

    In my first year I took an intermediate statistics class with a professor named Harry Roberts. I was 21 at the time. He was very much like me -- he was into all kinds of sports, and he was a runner. I had done a lot of statistics work as an undergraduate and had already worked with data, so I was pretty advanced when I started. But what I learned from Harry was a philosophy. He gave me an attitude toward statistics that has stuck with me ever since.

    With formal statistics, you say something -- a hypothesis -- and then you test it. Harry always said that your criterion should be not whether or not you can reject or accept the hypothesis, but what you can learn from the data. The best thing you can do is use the data to enhance your description of the world. That has been the guiding light of my research. You should use market data to understand markets better, not to say this or that hypothesis is literally true or false. No model is ever strictly true. The real criterion should be: Do I know more about markets when I'm finished than I did when I started? Harry's lesson is one that I've passed on to my students over the 49 years that I've been a teacher.