We have been talking the last few days about ChatGPT. One of the interesting things about a deep learning AI system is how it 'stores' knowledge.

In traditional computing systems, we can point to part on the storage device and say "these bytes are stored here" and "these other bytes …

On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:

You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?

If you ask a normal …

Back to Taleb's tweet

Yesterday we discussed about probability space vs consequence space. Taleb says: What ChatGPT is missing that while academia is in probability space, life is in consequence space.

What does this mean?

Here is where we need to understand how ChatGPT works. When you ask a question …

Since I have been writing about unexpected statistical outcomes due to skews in the dataset, I thought I'd take a look at Nassim Taleb's twitter to see what he has been tweeting about. I came across this tweet

This is quite an interesting tweet. Taleb mentions two terms: Probability space …

Here is another day to day situation where statistics can be very unintuitive.

Lets say we have a medical test that has 99 % accuracy. You take the test and it comes out positive. What is the chance that you are actually positive? Common sense would suggest that there is a …

I routinely come across day to day situations where statistics can be very unintuitive. Consider the case where we are designing an algorithm to identify some outlier - say credit card fraud as an example. Assume I design an algorithm and it is 99.99 % accurate.

Sounds impressive?

That is until …

Yesterday I wrote about common cause and special cause variation. Certain amount of randomness is always present in any system, and that causes fluctuations in the outcome. This is common cause variation. On the other hand, something unusual might happen from time to time which also affects the outcome. These …

Yesterday I mentioned about output vs outcome, and how I prefer to focus on output instead of outcome. The reason being that there are many factors that influence outcome.

Some of those factors are things that you can control. Many are things that you cannot.

Case in point: I recently …

There is a a lot of discussion these days on output vs outcome. Most take the position that we should focus on outcome instead of output.

The gist of the argument is that there is no value in measuring output because unless it impacts the outcome it is wasted. What …