Week 16
If data science / AI / deep learning is about reverse-engineering functions, can that help companies?
Yes
Functions abound in business. Let’s take the issue of churn. “Certain amount of my customers leave, stop engaging, why?” There is a function there. Input is the activity, demographics of the customers, output is whether they will churn. The dynamics of the company, product is such that there is a process, a computation that pushes people out the door. “Every customer older than 50 who are from region X, after doing such and such leave with Y probability”. We do not know this computation. How do we discover it? You could employ social scientists with math modeling skills to look at the data, come up with the model, test it, tweak it, to find the function that computes when a customer leaves, once that is understood steps can be taken to contain the damage.
Or we can simply feed the data (past customers who have churned) into DL and watch it approximate that model - then for any customer we could ask “the function” if customer will churn, if yes, maybe a targeted campaign can be organized, users can be enticed to stay more with the site, product, etc.
A great DL model on churn BTW is here. The discussion on the vagueness of churn was great.
News
YouTube was attacked by a video publisher woman
Odd
The woman was a nut job. Yes - gun control.
There is something odd going on with YouTube lately though, maybe this is a bad time to bring it up, but there is a feeling out there there is some kind of campaign to restrict certain video publishers. I shared a video of this person before (a finance guy talking abt the petrodollar) he complains all of a sudden he was marked in a negative way. Jimmy Dore complains all the time somehow his subscriptions are being knocked out, they “magically” disappear (the viewers say they subscribe then find out they are not), his ad revenue took a plunge. YouTube might want to check if there is a “splinter cell” of deep state lodged in there, fighting against non-establishment views.
Bernie Sanders
Israel overreacted … Gaza is a disaster right now
So true
- That’s all I am saying.
The idea of hierarchy has nothing to do with socio-cultural construction [then he goes on to say it is embedded in us, part of our evolution].
Untrue
If that were true, hunter-gatherers, who are our ancestors and themselves the result of billions of years of evolution, would be hierarchical. But foragers were completely the opposite, they were egalitarian. I can quote bunch of books here to prove this point but a Wikipedia link should suffice: “The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total, but is striking when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity’s two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. “.
We are not chimpanzees. Not lobsters either (Peterson also alludes to that in the video above).
Peterson does have some insight on other subjects, how ppl need to take responsibility, how success on job depends not directly on gender, how identity politics is not optimal for a person.. There is some thoughtful analysis there and the man is not a total jackass. But he doesn’t have all the pieces. I’d pay attention to him on his area of expertise - Peterson is a clinical psychologist, so here he has lots to say. History, anthropology, not as much.
Question
Some conservatives like him
Yes
JP is being held-up as an intellectual conservative, but the main problem here is what a lot of people think as conservatism is actually village / farm centered goatfucking. Hierarchy, patriarchy, all kinds of exploitation started during farming era. This little fact of course is uncomfortable for a lot of these “conservatives”, so they’d rather look for the root of the issue somewhere else.
From the other direction, someone like David Graeber (from the left), who did great work on the history of money and debt, can chose to ignore the division between these two important ages of humanity. I believe he subconsciously wants to blame hierarchy onto “exploitative capitalism”, exclusively. He wrote a big article about the non-existence of the said division, I got a wind of it, the funny story here is I asked Ian Morris what he thought about the article, who kindly responded, said Graeber was cherrypicking data. Then I told Graeber to check his shit, and he lost it and flamed me. True story.
Anyway. Also, there is a huge industrial, second wave aspect to hierarchy as well a la Toffler. None of that seems to be making it into the conversation. It’s all about Russia, lobsters.
News
Democratic Party sues Russia, Trump campaign and WikiLeaks alleging 2016 campaign conspiracy
Ha Ha
When will they get to stage 5 of grief?.. The Russia angle makes tactical sense of course - Trump wanted to partner with Russia, for geopolitical reasons, completely logical, then Dems lose the election, they turned that around and say of course he wants to partner because was bought by Russians. That way you also cover up the fact that you lost, badly, Democrats tried to be Republicans for too long, ideologically they became useless, defunct. The Russia segue covers all that up, unifies the troops, provides a common enemy.
News
WikiLeaks will call for a global blockade of Coinbase next week as an unfit member of the crypto community. Coinbase, a large Californian Bitcoin processor, responding to a concealed influence, has blocked the entirely harmless @WikiLeaksShop in a decision approved by management.
Coinbase, Not Cool
Question
What is the ideal company structure?
Gore Associates
Management is necessary to goad insufficiently competent (or let’s say misplaced) people. Or even sometimes manage an oddball client. So management, process is there to manage an overabundence of suck. Pick any management method, for software there is waterfall, agile, this is the case. Here is an excerpt on agile methods:
“Interestingly, this is also exactly how non-technical companies (like, say, Chrysler) handled software development. Except they didn’t hire the engineers. Instead, they contracted with software consultants, and they’d hand the consultants 2-year project specs, and demanded the consultants finish everything on time plus all the crap the customer threw in and/or changed after signing the contract. And then it’d all fall apart and the contractors wouldn’t get paid, and everyone was really miffed.
So some of the consultants began to think: “Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!” And so they did. When a company said “we want features A through Z”, the consultants would get these big index cards and write “A” on the first one, “B” on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: ‘OK, boy. Which one of these cards do you want to replace, BOY?’ “
I’d say hire smart people, reduce bureaucracy, hell even HR, which these days, constantly try to get you to “do stuff”, the rest will follow. Things need to be as natural, “naturally flowing” as possible. Do not try to recreate an entertaining “village” with all kinds of totems, where ppl pray to cat and dogs and shit, do a little human sacrifice, “socialize”. That stage was only a brief time in our evolution. We have been the other thing before that, for much, much longer.
If we give everyone free college education, that solves a big social problem. It also locks in a price which is ten times too high for no reason. This isn’t fair to the government, which has to pay ten times more than it should. It’s not fair to the poor people, who have to face the stigma of accepting handouts for something they could easily have afforded themselves if it was at its proper price. And it’s not fair to future generations if colleges take this opportunity to increase the cost by twenty times, and then our children have to subsidize that.
You are not locking in anything
I hear people making this mistake on universal healthcare too; Let’s say US currently is paying X%s of its GDP to healthcare. Then people ask “but if gov pays that aren’t we shifting the burden from one column to another? Is that fair?”. That’s not what’s happening. With universal healthcare the structure of the system will change; the government as a insurer becomes a major buyer of drugs, a payer to doctors. It can negotiate prices down to negligible amounts. It can take steps to remove “regulatory complexity” (see article) so doctors do not get sued unnecessarily. So that X% percent can go down to Y% which the public will then pay..
Same with college; gov will give a certain amount of money to schools, enough for educational needs, salaries, and the schools will make do with that amount. That could mean schools not being able to invite Milo Yiapowhateverfuckolous, or do other “interesting college culture life events”, well fine. Is that a big loss? The previous generation had none of these things, and they turned out fine. Today, we can have cheap computers + Internet! In my school (not a cheap school btw) we had not-too-famous but locally known comedians perform, I bet there was more socially relevant commentary there than whatever some political firebrand might have said.
(One comedian was this huge guy, he starts with “hey man, when you first saw me on stage did you think ‘look at that big mothe–k–er?.. Or did you think ‘look at that fat mothe–k–er?… [pauses a little] or did you think ‘look at that big fat mothe–k—er? [laughter]”. So we learned about weight issues in America. Just kidding. But there was some astute observations).
Question
If AI can be useful for businesses can this service be offered as consultancy?
Yes
In fact Google is fast developing a consulting arm to do just that. These guys will go in with bread-and-butter (for them obviously) new deep neural net methods, and offer solutions for business problems, code them, aaaand also provide the final platform to run those programs (Google Cloud). In fact consultancy is probably the window dressing for the GC part.
We hear the emphasis is using most recent methods, deep NN, deep RL, for almost everything [geek] I heard one engineer talk about using reinforcement learning even for industrial optimization problems, in place of simplex and other methods [/geek].
Comment
Google is crazy on NNs
Yes
One of the reasons their partnership with Boston Dynamics fell apart was probably G wanted BD to make its robots start from clean slate and “learn” everything they need from data. BD does more straight-forward science / engineering - they’d model all necessary movements one by one, trial and error… So this comes back to functions / reverse-engineering them from data using NN.
Both approaches are fine, but Google wants to rock’n roll, and pursue that other road.