marketforlemmas
Joined 13 years ago
Karma
33
Submissions
31
Member since
Nov 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
> WF lost money on this
This ignores the fact that Wells Fargo is a publicly traded company and has an incentive to make their numbers look good for their shareholders.
... And to be clear, your assertion is that thousands of employees across different branches all independently decided to commit fraud and risk their jobs all for an additional 450 per pay check? That is your alternative explanation?
Comment · 10 years ago
Is being chosen by Joel Spolsky not enough of an endorsement for you?
Comment · 10 years ago
So I've read the PP piece and your article, and I think your criticism is way off-base. The most technical part of your argument relies on a p-value being .057 vs .05, which is not a good one. No one seriously believes that .05 is magical number that determines true from false; things that are close to it but not quite below .05 are not automatically false.
They go on to give supporting analysis in form of the false positive and false negative rates by race, which is pretty compelling evidence. You claim to not believe that because you cant find it in the notebook but its literally right underneath the Cox model section.
I was intrigued by this article and went a step further to plot the ROC curves and the evidence is solid. It's messy, but you can see it here https://github.com/stoddardg/compas-analysis/blob/master/my_... in cell 78. Its quite clear that the algorithm is choosing a different point of optimization on the ROC for white people (a more lenient one) than for black people. A white defendant with a risk score of 5 is as likely to commit a crime as a black defendant is with a score of 7. That's an obvious case where you could simply relabel and be more fair but their algorithm chooses not to.
I also hate when people abuse bad statistics and reasoning to sell page views.
Comment · 10 years ago
I don't think advertising for jobs is a zero-sum game, especially if the matching algorithm is good enough to match employers and employees that had no knowledge of each other before. If you are able to reduce those search frictions, you have created value. Several economic professors won the Nobel prize for their work in this area:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-work-behind...
Comment · 10 years ago
To be a little more clear about the diamond and circle...
LASSO is a diamond because it represents the constraint that w_1 + w_2 <= 1. The region of (w_1,w_2) that satisfy that inequality is a square.
Ridge is a circle because it represents the constraint that w_1^2 + w_2^2 <= 1. The region of (w_1,w_2) that satisfy that inequality is a circle.
Comment · 10 years ago
Does SSRN come with any guarantee of peer review or minimum quality threshold? The only downside with arXiv is that anything can be posted. It works fine as a paper-hosting service but is terrible as a "social proof that my paper is OK". If SSRN comes along with such a reputation, then it might be a hard transition.
However if SSRN is just a paper-hosting service, then everyone should move to the arXiv immediately.
Comment · 10 years ago
Totally agree; this is basically a text-book example of the "No True Scotsman" argument.
Comment · 10 years ago
I think it's possible that its both a sickness and a boon. I fully agree with your point that the "fear of being a loser" does drive people to work harder, do better, etc. All of that has (generally) positive effects (well, assuming that you are willing to ignore the fact that many people will use less-tan-ethical means of making more money).
However I can also see it as a sickness in the sense that we fetishize this extreme success. Imagine a hypothetical person that has to make a choice between doing some risky start-up that will consume his/her life or getting a solid job that allows them to work 40 hours per week and then enjoy their personal lives. Nobody would explicitly blame the person who chooses the latter option but we celebrate (especially on HN) the people who choose the former option. We celebrate it to the point that there are many people who choose the harder option simply because they feel they are a loser for not going after it and throwing everything they have at it. I don't see that being a good thing that everyone who is on the fence decides to go for the risky/hard path simply because of some societal zeitgeist.
Then again, as you point out, those individual choices lead to our collective advancement, so it's a really hard balance.
Comment · 10 years ago
Thanks for the suggestion. If you click on them, they'll pop out to the full size. Otherwise, I couldn't figure out how to get it to appear OK on both desktop and mobile (because I"m not really a web developer).
Comment · 10 years ago
www.guessthekarma.com
It's a simple game where I show you two images from Reddit (SFW of course) and ask you to guess which was more popular. I'm using the data from the site as part of my research into the dynamics on internet popularity.
It's awesome because it's showing that Reddit is a pretty random/fickle thing. In the first iteration of the experiment (we're on the second now), people couldn't really do much better than randomly guessing. If one image had 10,000 upvotes and the other 10, people could only guess the popular one about 55% of the time. I wrote up some quick results in this blogpost: https://medium.com/@gregstod/guess-the-karma-2-0-82a224a691f...
I'd very much appreciate it if you played the game and donated a few data points :-)
Comment · 10 years ago
You are right that the general problem is intractable; a lot of the advances in these match making algorithms come from better heuristics and computing power.
What is non-linear data?