Sublime

“curse of dimensionality”—learning can become very hard when you have millions of potential levers to pull.

the number of people who think they understand statistics dangerously dwarfs those who actually do, and maths can cause fundamental problems when badly used.

a impossibilidade de calcular os riscos de acontecimentos raros e com consequências importantes e prever sua ocorrência.

Richard Thaler tells of a discussion about decision making he had with the top managers of the 25 divisions of a large company. He asked them to consider a risky option in which, with equal probabilities, they could lose a large amount of the capital they controlled or earn double that amount. None of the executives was willing to take such a

A Bayesian statistician, on the other hand, would say, “Wait a minute. We also need to take into account our prior knowledge about the coin.” Did it come from the neighborhood grocery or a shady gambler?

Rather, Bayes’s theorem deals with epistemological uncertainty—the limits of our knowledge.

Understanding the actual percent of users affected by the problem can guide the prioritization of problems and reduce some of the skepticism that comes with small sample sizes. Using the adjusted-Wald formula, if three out five users experience a problem with a design, we can be 95% confident between 23% and 88% of all users are likely to

Mark is a thin man from Germany with glasses who likes to listen to Mozart. Which is more likely? That (a) Mark is a truck driver or (b) he is a professor of literature in Frankfurt. Most will bet on B, which is wrong. Germany has ten thousand times more truck drivers than Frankfurt has literature professors. Therefore, it is more likely that Mark