Mandelbrot’s Levy distribution evidence was largely graphical and informal

Evidence

Cootner attacked Mandelbrot’s “messianic tone” and expressed his discomfort with what he said was Mandelbrot’s “disturbingly casual” use of evidence, noting that much of the evidence was “graphical and involves slopes of lines which are not given precise numerical values” (Cootner 1964, p. 333). Cootner marshaled his own evidence against the Levy hypothesis, and ended with an impassioned plea to consider the possible costs (the “loss functions,” as he put it) involved in the acceptance or rejection of the hypothesis: Mandelbrot, like Prime Minister Churchill before him, promises us not utopia but blood, sweat, toil, and tears. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 504

Categorization

• QUESTION: Was Mandelbrot’s graphical-evidence style actually as loose as Cootner charged, or was that a rhetorical framing? Worth checking primary sources.
• XREF: connects to: An income distribution glimpsed in a discarded paper steered Mandelbrot toward Levy’s stable distributions — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 477; Empirical aggregation tests undercut the Levy distribution’s self-similarity claim — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 507; Mandelbrot’s Levy distributions failed as a research cascade because they were analytically intractable. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1103

Broader Connections

• Empirical aggregation tests undercut the Levy distribution’s self-similarity claim #qualifies (0.80) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 507