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The third criteria of immediate feedback seems too stringent. In chess, feedback is often not immediate. If one were to run a reinforcement learning algorithm on chess with no huma…

Something that has been disturbing to me has been the rise of the phrase "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences." On some level, this is true. People can of cou…

If M ~ N(u,v_m) and W ~ N(u,v_w) [where N refers to the normal distribution], with v_m > v_w, then P(M > T) > P(W > T) for all T > u. I.e if the trait is approximately normally dis…

Just to respond to a few specific points: >Despite that unjustified leap, the document goes on to suggest strongly that women working at Google are less qualified than men Can you …

Seems like a lot of the controversy around these types of discussions comes from the consequences of bayesian inference. If you know that men and women differ in a distributional s…

I think that's being too results driven and doesn't take into account the risk that was taken. As another example, suppose your uber driver drove you home while intoxicated. Even i…

Just because his investors made money doesn't excuse him. Suppose you lent 10,000 to a friend and the friend promised to return it within a year. A year later, your friend doesn't …

All the stats stuff you mentioned (and more) is laid out very nicely in the second chapter of "Elements of Statistical Learning" https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf

It's hard to know if the returns are statistically significant given annual returns, but I'm sure he's providing more granular statistics to investors. Kinda annoying how the artic…

My suggestion would be to slow down when reading math or about math. Let's take Wikipedia's integer factorization for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization F…

Doug Polk is completely right and the binary "statistically significant or not" way of thinking is often stupid

Really nice proof! The "clearly" thing isn't too hard to see even if you aren't aware of the "alternating series theorem": Consider the sequence a1, a2, a3... with the sum being a1…

Well properly understanding why certain number systems work (fractions, negative numbers) requires some understanding of set theory, and the great mathematicians of the past strugg…

What is disagreeable about his comment? Do you disagree that examining a statistic by subgroup could provide more insight into the question?

Growth comes from reinvestment of capital into the business. This makes sense from a shareholder perspective when the risk-adjusted return on this invested capital outweighs the re…

Why not both? Both preparation and inherent ability are important. I find it implausible that everything can be explained by "mindset." Perfect pitch is a good example, it's a usef…

Yeah but the money he made from this doesn't sound like flow, sounds like a large directional bet (similar to the london whale event, except this one happened to work)

Whether or not it's a "fundamental principle of democracy" , the hyperbole and moral policing sets an extremely dangerous precedent. Yes, trump would be a terrible president but he…

Yes, preparation makes a big difference in math olympiad but most of those competing at a high level are already very talented to begin with. The problem is when a parent expects t…

In my experience, asian parents tend to vastly underestimate the importance of genetics that predetermine a child's strengths and dispositions. Kids that are born with some combina…

The desire to "keep up with the Jones's" is one of the strongest human motivators in my opinion and very hard to fight. Most people want to feel respected or on par with their soci…

This can be mitigated by evaluating all the models on a hold-out test set (similar to what kaggle does and what was done in the netflix prize). The multiple comparisons problem is …

it's r^2 in the denominator. one idea is to think of the geometry: the surface area of a sphere is proportional to r^2. therefore if you think of a constant "influence" at a given …

of course they wouldn't have sued if theranos had scored, that doesn't make their lawsuit invalid. companies should be accountable for the statements they make (see Enron)