notes on podcasts

mar 9 - good colin marshall podcast interviewing Ian Ayres on coming importance of supercrunching and statistics

• "we're going to have to get used to the fact that machines will beat us at statistical prediction, but at least for the present, to hypothesize is essentially human"
• "thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart"
• "he was able to predict the quality of bordeaux vintages by supercrunching numbers about rainfall and weather patterns"
• "statistical prediction often does better than legal experts"
• "everybody in law knows that the supreme court hates california"
• "over the last 15 years, supercrunching has become better than intuition"
• "looking someone in the eye and deciding if they are a bad risk to lend to was a bad business model"
• "if I were in highschool and good at math, I would seriously get into statistics and supercrunching"
• "when we rely on bad supercrunching in medicine, people can lose their lives"
• "metasupercrunching: supercrunching supercrunched statistics"
• BOOK: Super Crunchers:Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
• Ian Ayres home page: lots of books, links
• "supercrunching algorithms can admit the percentage of time that they are right and wrong, human experts have a problem with that"
• "definitely when you are into terabytes, I'd call that supercrunching, but it's more the speed, and that can happen on smaller datasets"
• "in a world where your website is getting millions of hits a day, you can run a randomized experiment to decide whether you should show a kitten or puppy on the first page"
• "graphic designers aren't smarter than a large group of 5th graders crowdsourced to find out what they like" (ian ayres)
• "poor man's supercrunching: create adword ads for your site and look at the click-through rates on each"
• "intuative people will still be needed but they need to be able to put their efficiency to the test"
• "I want ads targeted toward me"
• "from a statistics perspective, most of our relatives have died in vain, medical histories have just been thrown away"
• "the problem about medical records is doctors weren't uniform in how they kept them"
• "we should donate our medical data for altruistic supercrunching just as we should donate our organs"
• "no one should leave college without a course in statistics"
• "if you don't have an intuitive sense of what standard deviation is, then you are on the wrong side of the supercrunching divide"
• "statistics should replace calculus as the capstone math course of highschool, it's much more useful and important in life"
• supercruchers.com: 40 tools to help you supercrunch
• "supercrunching is the new fortune telling"