Daniel Levitin has an very enjoyable and informative popular science book in his Field Guide to Lies. He surveys how we know what we know, and how we communicate it to others. To be fair not all of it is about lies, for instance, he discusses how data is collected. A lot of the problems he…
Category: Management Theory
Improving Public Policy Through Testing
David Halpern is an interesting character. Originally an advisor to Tony Blair’s Labour government he went on to establish the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights for David Cameron’s Conservative government. His CV makes sense to me given what he specializes in. His aim is to make government policy better. The politicians decide what should be done and Halpern tries to ensure it…
Conducting Business Tests
We should be conducting business tests to have more confidence we are doing the right thing. Small And Big Decisions In business decisions are often taken “without having any real evidence to back them up” (Davenport, 2009, page 69). This is a source of great frustration to me, (and many academics). To be fair sometimes there…
Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More?
One puzzle for academics, myself included, is why businesses don’t experiment more? Why Don’t Businesses Experiment More? Experiments have great potential to improve business outcomes. Often businesses don’t seem to do much experimenting. Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus…
Causation And The Post Hoc Fallacy
Today’s post looks at causation and the post hoc fallacy. Types Of Fallacy There are generally two types of fallacy. The first is nice and clean. These are formal fallacies. These are clearly wrong by the rules of logic. The classic is the well-known fallacy that: If p then q, does not mean that if q…
Motivation For The New Year
Let us start the new year thinking about how motivation works. What encourages us to action? How can knowledge help us with motivation for the new year’s resolutions? Simple Views Of Motivation Dan Ariely has a new book on this topic. And to motivate you to read it I’ll say it is a very short book. Ariely…
Showing A Problem Does Not Equal Demonstrating A Worsening Problem
Cathy O’Neil has a great book on big data, Weapons of Math Destruction, but one with a fundamental flaw. The flawed claim is made in the book’s subtitle and permeates throughout the book. The subtitle is: “How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy”. I could find no significant evidence of big data increasing inequality in the book. She shows…
Is Math Racist?
Cathy O’Neil’s book – Weapons of Math Destruction – is an entertaining and informative read. She has done a great job of highlighting the challenges with math models. (I have one massive problem with the book but I’ll detail that next time, see here). First I’ll address the question on everyone’s mind: Is Math Racist? Math Models…
How Long Will We Be Unhappy?
A fascinating line of research tackles the problem of affective forecasting. Such forecasting involves questions such as: How Long Will We Be Unhappy? Affective Forecasting This area of research studies our predictions of how we will feel when events happen. We typically aren’t very good at affective forecasting. .. expectations are often important and often wrong. They are important…
The Flat Maximum And Data Science
Steven Finlay has a useful book on Data Science, (Predictive Analytics, Data Mining and Big Data). He has lots of helpful practical advice in an easy to access form. He highlights the idea of the flat maximum. The Flat Maximum This is a general recommendation to read the book. I will also highlight a point Finlay makes….
