Paleo, Startups, Analytics
Last week it was announced that the startup Gidsy had received a significant round of funding from high-profile investors.* Gidsy is a marketplace where people organizing activities are matched with people looking for things to do.
I’m a satisfied Gidsy user myself. Also, I’ve worked with the two brothers behind it on my own startup, and they are the real deal. Most importantly however, while I have reservations about a lot of startups being a net win for society, I think Gidsy definitely is.
Over the past years I have become a bit alarmed by the inactivity that modern day society induces, and technology in particular. This is what the so-called Paleolithic Lifestyle is all about. It means we should be critical of many things that are qualified as “progress”, if they take us further away from the life our genes expect for us.
Services like Gidsy encourage people to get out of the house. Not only that, in many instances they encourage them to be active. The bulk of the population sits all day in offices, only to come home to spend the evening – again sitting of course – behind the TV or on Facebook. This to me does not constitute a real life. Contrast this with the Gidsy activity ‘Primal Fitness’, where people get in touch again with how to move naturally and learn how to cooperate on practical physical tasks.*
When you go out and do something, often you are not just by yourself. You go with people you know, or you meet new people as a nice side effect. Like going to a cocktail party. Compare this to merely going to networking events. These are often unrelaxed settings where people are social in a forced way, because they have some agenda.
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that if people have an income source on which they are dependent (say a job), other than minimum wage, then most of them are not free.* They become afraid to bite the hand that feeds them so to say, and adapt their beliefs to their actions (instead of vice versa, which is the ethical thing to do). Companies like Airbnb, Zaarly, and TaskRabbit provide a platform where anybody can supplement their income.
Gidsy too helps people become less dependent. It stands out however, because it does so by letting them earn money doing what they love. Others it gives alternatives to passivity and isolation. That’s why I think it is a net win for society, and I sincerely wish the company and the team all the best.
In: Paleo
18 Jan 2012This weekend I flew back from Amsterdam to Berlin, a trip I take on a monthly basis. I picked up a Newsweek print edition, and came across an article that promoted 31 ways of getting smarter, including a lot of hacks.* Unlike many people, “hacking” something does not have a positive ring to me. I believe in solid basics, and this is often harder, more time-consuming, or expensive than looking for the easy way.
Let’s take intelligence, the focus of the article. There is this idea that you can hack this as well, by solving Sudoku puzzles, practicing mental arithmetic, eating certain foods, playing video games, etc.
While I’m sure you can identify some metric on which you will perform better after doing these activities, why bother in the first place? If you focus on the basics – like the simple joy of walking – you will score better on these arbitrary metrics too (if that’s your goal).
Therefore, here is my list of things worth doing in their own right. And oh, they will also make you smarter. As a side-effect.
In: Uncategorized
16 Nov 2011’No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training…what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.’ ~ Socrates
The cost of competitive sports: people start seeing a game/activity as an end in itself, specializing (and hence fragilizing) their bodies to some artificial situation & acquiring skills that hardly carry over to other activities, trying to “beat” others on some totally arbitrary metric. More generally, sports are a domesticated substitute for physical adventure & conflict.
In: Uncategorized
17 Aug 2011Freelance software developers are antifragile. Hard to imagine a skill more widely demanded across industries (robust), plus there’s always the possibility of being hired (for equity) by a software startup (also antifragile entities) or being a key member in starting one.
In: Analytics
2 Aug 2011A little data analysis project I worked on together with Chris Eidhof. Here we show how to set up a database connection with RMySQL, analyze the data in RStudio, and finally visualize the results with the package ggplot2.
In: Uncategorized
6 May 2011“The ideal trivium education, and the least harmful one to society and pupils, would be mathematics, logic, and Latin; a double dose of Latin authors to compensate for the severe loss of wisdom that comes from mathematics; just enough mathematics and logic to control verbiage and rhetoric.”
~Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes
In: Analytics
14 Apr 2011Most of what qualifies as research-oriented business intelligence comes down to identifying (previously unknown) patterns. Typically an analyst or business user sees an anomaly and drills down charts and tables to investigate. Ideally to identify the cause on a level as granular as possible. Subsequently, action is taken. However, how scientifically correct is this approach?
So say that for an online toy store we’ve identified that sales for a certain toy are particularly high for Chinese women aged 20-25. How can we know if this is a regularity, or that it merely happened by chance? The answer is that we cannot know for certain based on the current data alone. At this point it is still a hypothesis, inspired by a merely exploratory analysis. Note that we can not use our historical data for this comparison, as this data generated our hypothesis in the first place. We would need to set up an experiment to test it. One way to do this is to compare, from now until a certain date in the future, the sales of the toy for Chinese women aged 20-25 with (a sample) of the rest of the population.
Many analytics and business intelligence products are lacking in this respect, because 1) they have no support for testing hypotheses at all, or (more commonly) 2) they do not have the workflow systems in place for testing on new data. So the reality is that in most analyses the final step of testing is stepped over. This leads to acting on spurious patterns and in effect basing decisions on thin air. It is important to educate analysts and business users that being “data-driven” entails more than making decisions based on just looking at numbers and pretty visualizations.
In: Introduction
17 Jul 2009Hi everbody! Finally, I’m doing something with this domain. It’s been mine for over a year now, but never really put stuff up here. Now is the time. Some of the things I intend to publish here:
This is the site as it is now. As for the exact makeup and direction, I’ll figure that out as I go. Stochastic Tinkering, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call it, author of my all time favourite “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”. A reference I will call upon frequently for sure. So stay tuned, more will follow soon!
The Paleolithic lifestyle. Empirical Skepticism. Romans.