Data Science Happy Hours 7, 30OCT2020

Explicit content warning

11/01/20 • 81 min

Machine Learning legend Vin Vashishta swings by office hour to chat! Tonnes of awesome insight into what the future of data science is going to look like, why feature engineering can be dangerous, why a model is a hypothesis, and more!

Huge thanks to our sponsor for this episode - Cloud Academy! Go to https://cloudacademy.com/ and use the coupon code ARTIST for 50% off the monthly subscription fee for life!

[00:03:54] What I do as a mentor at DSDJ

[00:10:56] Vin’s perspective on the data science job market due to COVID

[00:14:09] Is data science going out of fashion?

[00:16:55] The two types of data scientists out there, one of them won’t survive

[00:21:50] You know, it's funny. It's got to be monitoring and production notes and stuff.

[00:23:25] Question on a project that an attendee was working on – clustering and topic modeling

[00:27:27] Saving models (to serve later)

[00:32:02] Is analytics data science?

[00:35:13] A philosophy less on feature engineering.

[00:40:45] Old school data mining and feature engineering

[00:46:02] You must validate your model

[00:55:15] Why is a model a hypothesis

[00:59:08] The importance of experimenting

[01:04:37] Is it ever OK to build a biased model?

[01:08:59] Preventing bad biases

[01:10:54] A philosophy of modeling

[01:15:24] Do we rule out deep learning?

Check it out and don't forget to register for future office hours: http://bit.ly/adsoh

If you want to interact with me multiple times a week, join Data Science Dream Job for 70% off: http://dsdj.co/artists70

Watch the episode on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx-pFw_ty92wJoWzoO7WlfaM7iYB8_qjm

We were voted one of the top ten data science podcasts by FeedSpot - check it out here: https://blog.feedspot.com/data_science_podcasts/

I was on the Human Prosperity podcast, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbD3aV2TfKk

Special Guest: Vin Vashishta.

Huge thanks to our sponsor for this episode - Cloud Academy! Go to https://cloudacademy.com/ and use the coupon code ARTIST for 50% off the monthly subscription fee for life!

[00:03:54] What I do as a mentor at DSDJ

[00:10:56] Vin’s perspective on the data science job market due to COVID

[00:14:09] Is data science going out of fashion?

[00:16:55] The two types of data scientists out there, one of them won’t survive

[00:21:50] You know, it's funny. It's got to be monitoring and production notes and stuff.

[00:23:25] Question on a project that an attendee was working on – clustering and topic modeling

[00:27:27] Saving models (to serve later)

[00:32:02] Is analytics data science?

[00:35:13] A philosophy less on feature engineering.

[00:40:45] Old school data mining and feature engineering

[00:46:02] You must validate your model

[00:55:15] Why is a model a hypothesis

[00:59:08] The importance of experimenting

[01:04:37] Is it ever OK to build a biased model?

[01:08:59] Preventing bad biases

[01:10:54] A philosophy of modeling

[01:15:24] Do we rule out deep learning?

Check it out and don't forget to register for future office hours: http://bit.ly/adsoh

If you want to interact with me multiple times a week, join Data Science Dream Job for 70% off: http://dsdj.co/artists70

Watch the episode on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx-pFw_ty92wJoWzoO7WlfaM7iYB8_qjm

We were voted one of the top ten data science podcasts by FeedSpot - check it out here: https://blog.feedspot.com/data_science_podcasts/

I was on the Human Prosperity podcast, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbD3aV2TfKk

Special Guest: Vin Vashishta.

Previous Episode

A Mad Scientist Fights Against Stupidity | Sean Derrig

Sean Derrig is NOT an eco-warrior, he’s a scientist. And he’s on a mission.

He’s also the author of a wildly entertaining and informative blog called Rectofossal Ambiguity - where he takes on the alter ego RectoFossa, a grumpy microbiologist who thinks writing this blog might be an antidote to all The Stupid on the internet. Recto Fossa is latin for arsehole, apparently.

Huge thanks to our sponsor for this episode - Cloud Academy! Go to https://cloudacademy.com/ and use the coupon code ARTIST for 50% off the monthly subscription fee for life!

FIND SEAN ONLINE

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanderrig/

Website/Blog: https://rectofossal.com/

QUOTES

[00:20:59] "So biologists, we're all obsessed with shit, basically. Especially microbiologists."

[58:32] "You need to understand that your success is entirely wrapped up in how successful you can make your team. It's not about you. It's about the people you put around you and what you can do to make them truly successful. And that's what you got your success from, because the company isn't going to grow based on finding your own ego. It just it doesn't - it would be great if it did. It would be marvelous. But life life doesn't work like that."

[01:00:17] "And without the ego and the drive of the lunatic at the helm, things don't happen. However, you do need somebody with their eye on the brakes and an eye on the cliff that you're hurtling towards, as well as."

[01:03:56] "I'd say just keep canceling the bullshit out there. Let's get the good studies out there and make sure that people understand what they mean and what they don't. And in terms of science communication, what you need to suss out really quickly is the level you need to pitch something at"

[01:05:11] "Either we can do this, which we think is quite a good idea, or we can hold our hands in a bucket of shit and give ourselves a huge round of applause. Which would you prefer to do? Well, I think I'll do the first one."

[01:06:36] "One of the greatest advertising copywriters ever once said when you're writing it out, that's only 10 percent of people read beyond the first line. So you've blown 90 percent of your budget on the first sentence. Make it a fucking good one. And in that, I think sums it up, it's you need to make sure you grab their attention"

[01:11:35] "I'm basically unemployable, and I haven't done too badly."

[01:16:39] "You need to continually reinvent and improve yourself because there's always a superior model."

[01:18:13] "There's just so much stuff out there that I don't know. I'm totally disappearing in a bubble of my own confirmation bias."

[01:21:46] "If you're uncomfortable with gay marriage or opposite marriage, it's fine, you can be as uncomfortable with that as you want, just don't marry a gay person and it will never, ever, ever, ever affect you"

SHOW NOTES

[00:01:33] Guest Introduction

[00:03:28] Sean’s journey to the dark side of microbiology

[00:06:56] What's the dark side of microbiology?

Sean Derrig: [00:09:18] 70 billion friendly bacteria

[00:14:31] WTF is a “fatburg”

[00:18:27] All the unexpected ways we’re wasting water

[00:21:05] What is a radicle?

[00:21:42] Debunking big pharma

Sean Derrig: [00:23:36] The importance of good inclusion criteria

[00:27:08] Biases in biological sciences

[00:31:21] The importance of randomized trials

[00:34:56] How to not bullshit yourself

[00:38:34] Question everything

[00:39:53] Bayes theorem and COVID testing

[00:49:34] Which is worse for COVID testing: false positives or false negatives?

[00:52:31] Sensitivity and specificity in COVID testing

[00:53:35] Bayesian psychology

[00:56:00] Tips for entrepreneurs

[00:58:32] What success is all about

[00:59:55] Traits of successful entrepreneurs

[01:01:39] Entrepreneur in the COVID era

[01:01:50] That would be kind of interesting inside.

[01:04:52] How to communicate with executives in a way that will make them care

[01:08:15] Sean talks about his patents

[01:11:27] What's the one thing you want people to learn from your story?

[01:12:02] Lightning round

Special Guest: Sean Derrig.

Next Episode

How To Make Better Decisions | Annie Duke

Annie Duke is a is a poker champion turned author, consultant, and corporate speaker whose here to teach us how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

We go deep into Annie's books: Thinking in Bets and How to Decide. By the end of this episode you'll have a set of tools to help you in your decision making process. And you'll also get some insight into why the election doesn't go the way you thought it would!

FIND ANNIE ONLINE

Website: https://www.annieduke.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/annieduke

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-duke-30ab2b5/

QUOTES

[12:25] "Betting is basically saying I have some set of limited resources that I can invest in to and I'm choosing among options where how that option turns out is not deterministic. It's probabilistic."

[15:09] "...And whichever one you choose is just a prediction of which one's more likely to produce a happier version of you in the future."

[16:25] "We're living in a probabilistic world, meaning that there are very few decisions that you can make that are guaranteed to have one single outcome."

[20:14] "But presidential campaigns actually happen over quite a long period of time...Can you think of anything? Where in real time, people are analyzing the decisions that are being made more than a national presidential election."

[26:10] "Our brains really like to make a create a narrative that makes sense where one thing leads to another and kind of an orderly fashion. We really aren't comfortable with randomness."

[28:19] "So luck is intervening between the decisions that you make, the option that you choose, and the particular outcome that you happen to observe."

[32:43] "I also don't know a lot of stuff. The way to solve for that is to go explore the universe of stuff that I don't know, and to explore that in a really objective way. Where I'm kind of like maximizing my ability to run into information that is different than the things that I believe to be true,."

[39:40] "Well, smart people are just better at spinning narratives. They're better at looking at a set of data and interpreting that data to fit the model that they already have. That's just why it's just like this kind of narrative spinning that's kind of going on in our heads."

[01:01:58] "It's not that imagining failure causes failure. It's that imagining failure causes success, because if you imagine failure, you can see all the obstacles that might be lying in your path and then you can actually do something about them before you run into the obstacle"

SHOW NOTES

[00:01:32] Guest introduction

[00:03:00] How Annie became the “Duchess of Poker”

[00:04:09] What Annie’s hometown was like

[00:07:44] What high school was like for Annie

[00:09:59] How Annie’s experiences led to writing her books

[00:12:07] What are bets, what are decisions and what's the relationship between them?

[00:16:06] The perils of “resulting”

[00:17:45] Why you shouldn’t equate decision quality with outcome quality

[00:20:14] Decisions and elections

[00:24:19] Why our brains are not built for rationality

[00:26:10] Why our brains need narrative

[00:30:50] Your beliefs have two major weaknesses

[00:35:48] Why being smarter makes you more susceptible to motivated reasoning

[00:40:48] The decision multiverse

[00:44:29] Your good outcomes aren’t always a result of good decision making

[00:48:10] How Thinking in Bets changed my life and a case study of Bayesian psychology in the job search process

[00:53:42] Dealing with things that are not in your control

[00:55:46] The pre-mortem

[00:59:01] The power of negative visualization

[01:03:36] The influence of Stoic philosophy on Annie’s work

[01:04:02] A dude in a basement has a hypothesis...

[01:04:29] Positive thinking and the Reticular Activating System

[01:08:07] The Alliance for Decision Education.

[01:09:56] We’re not teaching kids the things they really need to know

[01:14:41] It’s one hundred years in the future - what do you want to be remembered for?

[01:15:01] The random round

Special Guest: Annie Duke.

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