fbbwsa

Great interview, I enjoyed both Blink and Tipping Point.

However, I bristle at this: WSJ: Do you worry that you extrapolate too much from too little? MG: No. It's better to err on the side of over-extrapolation.

I definitely disagree. Overextrapolation is a problem in our society. People try so hard to find signal where there's only noise, then find some conclusion and pass it as fact. Eventually someone of consequence believes it and it ultimately pollutes the information landscape.

Most people don't understand science or statistics, so it frightens me that spurious correlations (with terrible r^2 values) seem to become new "facts".

I used to work in a genome sequencing lab. DNA has lots of secrets for us to uncover. DNA might contain clues for discovering genes related to diseases like Alzheimers. One might extrapolate that genetic code contains the possibility of understanding or even curing some disease. The problem is thats a dangerous extrapolation and when it becomes commonplace to believe that human genome research can rid the world of disease (which some people somehow subscribe to), we've overstepped some boundaries.

Overextrapolation, as a rule, is not the way to go.

this is phenomenal. i hate this blog in general, but this was a good post, and i think it aptly describes America's consumption problem.

Americans consume for fun instead of necessity.

The "shopping as an outlet for women" idea has never made sense to me. It seems to me that some people shop not even because they enjoy OWNING the items they buy, but because they enjoy BUYING the items they buy.

Retail industry's dream come true.

i think there are still plenty of fun things to find in stock market data. most quants are looking at the same problem. i play with market data a lot and you'd be amazed how uneducated the general public seems to be.

also, i second ntoshev's recommendations for netflix prize -ish applications. collaborative filtering/clustering seems to be an inadequate science at best as far as i can tell.

allowing smart people creative freedom seems to solve so many problems that it blows my mind its not more common.

as far as i can tell, thats the thesis behind google's 20% time. i think its even cooler that Honda encourages this behavior and that system is so intrinsic to their culture that they don't even use it as a major selling point to potential employees. just business as usual.

innovation seems to be so rarely rewarded in stiff corporate environments and thats a damn shame.

pseudoscience is the worst kind of "science".

its amazing how graphs and pretty rhetoric trick uneducated readers.

see: current HN post #1 -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366857

i like french fries.

definitely source specific. innovative algorithms stay private for good reasons

agree. best article i've read in 2008, hands down. phenomenal prose, somehow he seems to write in a way that could make any subject compelling. This is what the author of Bringing down the house should aspire to be.

"Howard currently manages a hedge fund and has done so since June of 1998. The fund has evolved into a long only fund..."\

uh oh... nothing says "disastrous returns" more than "long only fund" right now...

yes, i'd be interested in seeing it put on the web for use. for casual observers, this is interesting.

no, i don't think it could be built into a viable online business. most people who have backtesting needs have access to the necessary data via existing subscription services.

unless a new service provides "cleaner" data and more breadth than existing services, it'd be hard to be competitive.

the consumers in this market are relatively insensitive to price, so that wouldn't be seen as a significant advantage either.

provide some value.

there doesn't really appear to be anything there that provides anything there that isn't already readily available in other places.

Aggregating market information is good, but there is so much out there that does it already that it'd be better to have even ONE thing that gives someone a unique reason to go to markets.com

obviously they DO work then, since most indices are down 40% on the year.

Hedgefunds are designed to outperform benchmark indices. Outperforming by 23% is phenomenal.

By the logic of the poster, a year where the SP500 returned 50% and a fund returned 10% would be proof that hedge funds DO work. That fund manager would be immediately fired.

Hedge funds have outperformed for the last 10 years. Taking a one year performance that loses money doesn't mean anything.

i hate to endorse that behavior, but i actually tend to agree.

the pie is huge. taking small crumbs of marketshare as an individual is plenty.

might not be the model for your million dollar idea, but there's a subtle, guilty fun in beating people at their own game.