So I finally read the book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic and just as everyone had said: it’s very, very good. The book tells two stories in parallel: the first is the tale of the development and marketing of Oxycontin by the now-disgraced pharmaceutical giant Purdue and the second is the story of how a relatively unsophisticated (or at least loosely-organized)...
I know what you’ve all been thinking: you’ve missed listening to me ramble on for minutes at a time about random pieces of technology that I find interesting. You’ve also been wondering if I’ve grown a quarantine mustache. Well, have I got a treat for you: Databases Demystified Youtube Channel In this course, we’re going to cover all of the most important topics for understanding how and why...
Recently I read the paper Statistical Paradises and Paradoxes in Big Data (I): Law of Large Populations, Big Data Paradox, and the 2016 US Presidential Election by Xiao-Li Meng and I found a number of insights in the paper really fascinating — however, I haven’t seen much coverage of these insights in other locations likely because the paper is pretty dense and the way Meng presents...
I’m taking advantage of the quarantine to get caught up on a lot of my long-overdue reading and this week I finished Evicted by Matthew Desmond and it was incredible (it won a Pulitzer, so it’s not like I’m the first person to say that). The book does an incredible job of blending ethnographic study with policy analysis in a way that brings the actual problems that actual poor people face to...
A few weeks ago I was working on a project using GAMs to estimate the gradients of the marginal effects of the likelihood of a customer to convert. This was a very cool problem, and I learned a lot, but it took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to get the built-in functions to generate outputs that are interpretable in a regression with a binary dependent variable (e.g., logistic-style...
I just finished Distancia de Rescate (Fever Dream) by Samantha Schweblin and, after a bit of a slow start, I really, really loved it. The reviews call it a “horror” novel, which it is, I suppose, but in a very different way than any horror novel I’m familiar with. I was afraid that it would be something like a pulpy Stephen King novel — something that keeps you up at night but doesn’t provide a...
This weekend I invested a bunch of time in researching note-taking systems and applications — I want to get in the habit of both writing more and maintaining a repository of things I’ve thought about and learned and the quarantine seems like a good idea to really sink some time into these sorts of organizational tasks (I’m also experimenting with a new email client Airmail and...
I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State and as Scott chronicles the myriad ways that governments totally screw things up for their constituents through (often) well-meaning schemes of modernization and improvement, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this concept applies to the work I do in software engineering and product management. (Note: if you want to read a...
Last night on a boozy zoom call with some friends I did a very poor job of trying to explain how I think about the difference between price and value (and why that difference is important). I’m going to try to use this space to clarify my thoughts on the subject in a way which will hopefully be informative to y’all as well. I believe that the term “value” can apply to a...
In the last few years I have invested _a lot_ of time in pure, rote memorization. Over this period, I’ve changed my opinion 180 degrees from how I thought about memorization when I was in high school. Back then, I thought that any topic that was “pure memorization” wasn’t worth learning, and now I believe that memorization is a necessary condition for many types of...