Another one: don’t program your own AB testing framework! Every time I’ve seen engineers try to build this on their own, it fails an AA test (where both versions are the same so there should be no difference). Common reasons are overly complicated randomization schemes (keep it simple!) and differences in load times between test and control.
I don't keep that up with it but it seems like the ecosystem has kind of collapsed the last few years though? Like you have optimizely and its competitors that are fully focused on huge enterprise with "call us" pricing right out the gate. VWO has a clunky & aged tech stack that was already causing problems when I used it a couple years ago and seems unchanged since then.
If you're a medium-small business I see why you'd be tempted to roll your own. Trustworthy options under $15k/year are not apparent.
This is a rewriting of history. Before we ever had results from the COVID vaccine trials, the FDA declared that the primary goal of the trials was to prevent any symptomatic infection in the first place. From June 2020: https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download.
I'm not sure linking to a document with phrases like "As it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine might be much more effective in preventing severe versus mild COVID-19" really proves that it's "rewriting history" to suggest that preventing all infections or symptomats of a respiratory diseases is an very high bar to set, or that the medical profession hasn't been cognizant of that from the start...
Sure, and Viagra was developed to treat hypertension. The fact that efficacy data changes with the completion of new studies or advent of new strains should be viewed as normal, not as a surprise or some kind of bait and switch.
This paper is intended as a sarcastic critique of the push towards conducting randomized trials in academia/medicine, but it’s an obvious straw man. You could write this sarcastic article for any research method - “see, why do research using method X when we already know the answer from other methods?”
The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
Is that a problem? It can be true in isolation of the fact that sometimes, what's going to happen without a RCT is just obvious, because an experiment is not needed to answer every conceivable question.
"obvious straw man" researchers should be worrying about the non-obvious strawmen. Because these extreme conditions help up check the boundaries of what is possible to verify or not.
> The problem is that there are plenty of research questions where RCTs show us that previous non-RCTs were wrong.
And that is fine. When you are able to use an RCT.
I was similarly addicted and quit for similar reasons. https://www.weancaffeine.com worked really well for me - I bought 3 packs and was off caffeine in a few weeks. I was slightly slower those weeks but it wasn't so painful.
> While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
What's appalling here is that Clearview is playing in God mode, monitoring and acting on what Law Enforcement is doing, IN THEIR OWN INTEREST, without any oversight. The potential for this to backfire is astronomical
Sadly, it reminds me of all the stories of authorities using databases for stalking women they're interested in, or people they have a personal grudge against, or whatever.
> Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals’ migration, we find rent control limits renters’ mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.
- The survey covers just SV elites. It would be interesting to see how those beliefs compare to rank-and-file SV tech company employees (and to see that broken down further by profession). Differences in values between employees and bosses could lead to conflict further down the road.
- I'm reading more lately about the degree to which our temperament (the Big 5 personality index) influences our political beliefs. For instance, the managers and executives of established companies tend to be very high in Conscientiousness, which correlates with conservative beliefs. Entrepreneurs on the other hand score very high in Openness, which correlates with Liberal beliefs. I suspect their differences from standard Democrat politics stems from a relatively lower score in Agreeableness.
Great points on both. On #2, we wanted to include those, but space constraints :/. Given the interest in this survey we'll probably do another after collecting more suggestions like these. Thanks!
the nyt open with:
"Silicon Valley has long preferred to remain aloof from national politics, but the Trump era has altered that stance."
which is kinda of hard to defend since Obama constantly blocked the bay area on reelection campaigns and most of his advisors came from/went to silicon Valley companies.
I'm kind of wondering what happened between c. 1999 and now. The WTO meetings in Seattle were protested vigorously by "anarchist anti-globalists" who sought to protect American workers from the competition of outsourcing and cheap goods from overseas (China was going to enter WTO) So much so the next meetings were in Doha.
But now, these same class of people are quite a bit more pro globalization and might be considered globalists. They somewhat ironically seem to embrace some big aspects of neoliberal economics which is something they were quite antithetical to back in the early 2000's --so what gives?
Because "globalism" is a misnomer, it's shorthand for "economic globalism". Economic globalism is the exploitation of the masses by opening the borders for trade and desirable workers, whilst keeping them closed for the 99% of this planets population.
That's the kind of "globalism" the tech elite supports. They love to hide behind closed borders when it protects their wealth and power.
Those "same class of people" have always supported true globalism for the people in terms of a complete removal of borders. Don't blame them because greedy neoliberals have hijacked the term globalism.
During the TPP debate I thought there was a discussion about this type of "free trade" I think this article from C4SS sums up the position of this new globalism
"In the early 20th century, when most industrial capital was national, Western countries’ main imports were raw materials from the colonial world and their main exports were finished industrial goods. So it was in the interest of American manufacturers to restrict competition in the domestic market from imported goods manufactured in other industrialized countries. Fast forward 100 years though, and most American imports are by the Western-owned global corporations themselves, importing goods produced under contract for them so they can sell them in the domestic market at an enormous “intellectual property” markup over the cost of production.
Since the movement of goods across borders is now mostly an internal affair of global corporations themselves, outmoded tariffs that impede the movement of goods have become an inconvenience. What they need, instead, is a form of protectionism that still gives them a monopoly over selling a particular product in a particular market — but operates at corporate boundaries rather than national ones. That’s what “intellectual property” does.
Aside from the manufacturing corporations we just discussed, most of the other profitable industries in the global economy have business models centered on IP: Entertainment, software, electronics, biotech, etc.
So what’s falsely called “free trade” today isn’t a decrease in protectionism. It’s a shift from one kind of protectionism that no longer serves corporate interests, to a new kind of protectionism that better serves them."
Seattle has been growing a lot in the past decade or two. I don't think we can conclude the population in the early 2000s is the same class of people that are there now.
From what I recall mainstream media claimed that many were anarchists from all over the country --most not local. We could look at arrest records from those protests.
Often media make similar claims about the current bands or people who self identify as anarchists and progressive --but ideologically they align more with neoliberalist ideas about free trade of goods, labor etc --with a Marxist bent this time (although I don't think that's been well thought out, given the implications)
