I've recently purchased a Nexus 6p phone. It's a pretty sweet device - it's the first phone that actually fits in my larger than average hands. One thing I really don't like about it is the compass; when I'm using google maps to navigate, the compass will regularly point in the …

Awesome monsters

A Jedi's Path to Jihad

A blacksmith debunks 9/11 conspiracy theories

Why the US Government must lose Cryptowars 2.0

The Problem of Induction - an important problem in the philosophy of science, namely on how we justify inductive reasoning. See also Scott Alexander on the topic.

Computer …

One of the things I like most about India is it's medical system. As an American, I've experienced both the Indian and US medical systems, and at this point I have a very strong preference for the Indian one. Somewhat surprisingly, the Indian medical system is based on free market …

A couple of weeks ago Paul Graham wrote a bit about the detection of bias - i.e., the question of whether a decision process favors some subgroup in a manner that reduces outputs. Specifically, the decision process receives a set of data points and renders a go/no go decision …

Modern Art Desserts - a very cool book which I take some inspiration from.

Where Superforecasters Start - tl;dr; the base rate.

Statistics and Computer Science

JavaScript and fast data structures: some initial experiments

Why do we make statistics so hard for our students? Discusses how basically all hypothesis tests have …

A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …

I gave a talk last week at Crunch Conf in Budapest about the multiple comparisons problem. You can the slides here.

I gave a talk on friday about Bayesian A/B testing at Gilt's engineering seminar. You can view them here.

I've written a blog post describing the testing philosophy of SmartStats, VWO's new Bayesian powered A/B testing engine. In it, I discuss the difference between hypothesis testing (with the goal of finding truth) and making good decisions (with the goal of maximizing revenue). Go check it out on the …

I've written a number of posts here about a/b testing, and readers have probably observed that I favor the Bayesian approach. I'm very happy to announce that Wingify (my employer) has release SmartStats - a fully Bayesian A/B testing engine. I've always maintained that you should A/B test …