“我得到過的最好建議”精選集

經濟學家，作家

????1960年當我進入芝加哥大學（the University of Chicago）時，我接觸到了一些進行新興金融研究的教授。那時金融還算不上是一門學科，正在誕生之中，而我恰巧就到了它正在誕生的地方。因此，我有點著迷，當時學校里每個人都感興趣。

????第一年，我學了門中級統計，授課教授是哈瑞·羅伯茨。當時我21歲。他和我很像——他喜歡一切體育運動，是位跑步健將。我在本科時做過很多統計工作，早就在和數據打交道。因此當我開始學時，就比其他人領先了很多。但我從哈瑞那里學到的是理念。他教給我的是對統計的態度，直到現在我也還是堅持這樣的態度。

????正統的統計學是給出一個假設，然后檢驗。哈瑞總是說，你的標準不應該是接受、還是否決這個假設，而是能從數據中了解到什么。最好是能用這些數據強化你對世界的描述。這一直是我研究的指導明燈。應該利用市場數據更好地了解市場，而不是說這個或那個假設是真是假。沒有一個模型是嚴格意義上正確的。真正的標準應該是：當我完成時，是比剛開始時更了解市場了嗎？我當老師的49年來，我也一直把哈瑞的建議教給學生們。

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.