Signals from Search
- What people search for is in itself a signal
- The order of keywords in which they search is also a signal
- Quality of google search data is better than in Facebook because
You are alone with no fear of being judged
- You have an incentive to be honest
On Big data
- the needle is still the same size but the haystack has been getting bigger
- Be judicious by cutting down the sample size of the data to be used
Data science
- Trust your intuition as the initial signal but verify quantitatively to avoid narrative bias
- Correlation is most often sufficient for utilization purposes - often the explanation of why the model works comes after the fact
- critically assess the actual data underlying the narrative. At times it might tell a very different story than narrative presented
- Clustering of groups of people helps predicts behavior - Netflix and baseball
- AB testing to discover causations
Social Impact
- great business are found on:
secrets about nature
- secrets about people
- Modeling
Physics - utilize neat equation
- Human behavior - probabilistically via Naive Bayes classification
Managing angry people
- Lecturing them will provoke their anger
- Provoking their curiousity will cause their attention to be diverted causing anger to subside
Related readings
- *Zero to one*, Peter Thiel