The Original Upsetter
(Source: gypsylou, via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)
What Data Can't Do
By: David Brooks
NY Times, February 18, 2013
Data struggles with context. Human decisions are not discrete events. They are embedded in sequences and contexts. The human brain has evolved to account for this reality. People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes and multiple contexts. Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.
Data creates bigger haystacks. This is a point Nassim Taleb, the author of “Antifragile,” has made. As we acquire more data, we have the ability to find many, many more statistically significant correlations. Most of these correlations are spurious and deceive us when we’re trying to understand a situation. Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect. The haystack gets bigger, but the needle we are looking for is still buried deep inside.
One of the features of the era of big data is the number of “significant” findings that don’t replicate the expansion, as Nate Silver would say, of noise to signal.
Big data has trouble with big problems. If you are trying to figure out which e-mail produces the most campaign contributions, you can do a randomized control experiment. But let’s say you are trying to stimulate an economy in a recession. You don’t have an alternate society to use as a control group. For example, we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.
Data favors memes over masterpieces. Data analysis can detect when large numbers of people take an instant liking to some cultural product. But many important (and profitable) products are hated initially because they are unfamiliar.
Data obscures values. I recently saw an academic book with the excellent title, “ ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” One of the points was that data is never raw; it’s always structured according to somebody’s predispositions and values. The end result looks disinterested, but, in reality, there are value choices all the way through, from construction to interpretation.
This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.”
Yahoo is going to buy Tumblr?
—Huh.
Oh-ho Matty
They say misery loves company, but they say a lot of shit and most of it’s stupid. In my experience, misery is darkness and company is light — although I guess it depends on the company you keep.
The company I kept was Matty. He’s the best type of friend you could have. He’d tell you your writing was excellent when you thought it was shit. Then he’d write something that amazed you and say it was garbage. It’s how I knew my writing wasn’t horrible. He wasn’t just being nice, he just had some of the same demons.
Observations at work.
Subjective (10/05/2013)
The other day at work, I had a gauntleteer shadow me on phones. Massaad and I sit back to back, and we were pretending to be alpha males and being ironically competitive over some metric or something.
My Shadower chimed in with, “Well, I’m here, and I promise to be completely subjective.”
I said, of course, “Objective, you mean, right?”
Here comes a ramble.
Babby’s First Method
(Shouldn’t have used a space on line 10… hmm)
Summer Mode (05/05/13)
If you were watching my Twitter account, you probably saw the photos that Carly posted this afternoon, after we walked back from the Farmer’s market.
D’awwwww.
With the start of May comes the start of Farmer’s market season, and that means duck eggs! Duck eggs are probably one of my favourite things in the world.
Scenes from a Living Room (05/05/2013)
- Matthew: Hey, do you want to wear matching outfits today?
- Carly: No, I don't think it's tiem.
- Matthew: Wait... what did you say?
- Carly: I said, 'No, I don't think it's tiem.'
- Matthew: And that's T-I-M-E or T-I-E-M?
- Carly: ...
- Matthew: You've been spending too much time on the internet.
5.times { print “Odelay!”}
—The Poignant Guide To Ruby
Procrastination at its finest.
Thoughts About The Abyss (05/04/2013)
I’ve had about four hours of sleep.
The only bad part of my life right now is really my own fucking problems. Back when I was in counselling, I had a neutral void where I could put all of my problems out in the sun to air out, in the Barack Obamian sense of sunshine being the best disinfectant. In reality, it was more of a black-site where I could torture my enemies (negative, self-loathing thoughts) and make them crack open and spill their guts about what was really getting to me. (Repression, and what I talk about below…)
Or maybe it was more like yelling into the abyss, expressing my frustration with the way things are in my own mental junkyard. A fluctuating void in myself, filled with half-finished projects—hours of recordings, abandoned writing projects, the least of which is a pile of 15,000 words of a NaNoWriMo staring me in the face. Its plot seems to be doomed, forever in flux, its characters dismantling themselves, becoming automatons that menacingly roam around the landscape in there, occasionally having pot-shots taken at them by my anxieties and ever-encroaching responsibilities.
God, that’s dramatic.
Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.
—Jack Kerouac (via fuckyeahbeatgeneration)
Apparently, this was the guy who was deoported for being too handsome.
Suddenly, I understand.
This man is likely to be deported for being “too sexy” for Paris, New York, and Milan.
(Source: hahaniechan, via monika-young)