How to be a Bayesian
Statistics is all about calculating probabilities, and there are two camps who interpret probability differently.
Frequentists = frequency of events over multiple trials
Bayesians = subjective belief of outcome of events
All posts by Paras Chopra
How to think about risk
The most common mistake with risk is NOT differentiating: personal, unique risk
FROM
collective, average risk.
On the strangeness of giving advice
1/ Giving advice is a strange thing.
2/ First of all, let's get this right off the bat: the advice-giver accrues MORE benefit from giving advice than the one who's receiving it.
3/ When we give advice, our half-formed thoughts crystallize and tell us clearly and reinforce what we believe in.
Perils of binary thinking
We recently ran an A/B test and here were the results.
In the test results we still don't have 95% statistical confidence (probability to be the best) but we're going ahead and implementing the variation on homepage.
Why?
Twyman’s law
Twyman’s law states that any data or figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong.
Sounds unbelievable, isn’t it?
But, it’s true. I saw this in action recently and wanted to share that story with you.
In June, we ran a test on our homepage and while I was looking at conversion rate by segments, I noticed that users from Windows had a 400% higher signup rate for VWO free trial as compared to users using Mac OS X.
Now, that’s baffling and our team spent a good deal of time trying to understand why was that happening. Someone in marketing hypothesized that perhaps Mac OS X users have a better design aesthetic and our homepage wasn’t appealing to them. Was it true? ... Read the entire post →
Horizon based thinking
Whenever you’re at a crossroads and are wondering what to do next, here’s how to think.
1/ The first thing to ensure is that you acknowledge that a lot of your decision-making will be driven by how you’re feeling *right now* and not how you’ll feel once you choose a path.
The need to escape can make us choose things that we won’t like long term.
2/ The way to keep emotion-driven decision at bay is to *force* yourself to think in three horizons:
1. Short term goals
2. Long term goals
3. The path between the two
3/ Yes, I know this sounds trivial but far too often:
– We’re either hyper-focused on short term and optimize our way to getting stuck into a local-optima
– Or, we’re hyper-focused on the long term and forget that present actions is how we get to the future ... Read the entire post →