onuralp

Here is the modern version of the riddle: if you are to analyze your e-mail responses (e.g., tone, wording), do you notice any gender bias?

I was intrigued with the story[0] where the colleagues of opposite gender swapped their names when signing their client e-mails, and the responses they received were heavily gender biased. While this may be anecdotal, I would not be surprised if this is more prevalent than (hopefully) appreciated.

[0] https://twitter.com/i/moments/839950218099576832

This tweet triggered an interesting thread on whether [teaching] statistics requires [teaching] calculus:

> @johnmyleswhite: One meme I wish would die off: the belief that we can teach high school students statistics without teaching them calculus

https://twitter.com/johnmyleswhite/status/846497060949913600

See HN discussion on the related arxiv preprint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13950423

Most of the lectures from Representation Learning symposium held at Simons Institute last month are made available online: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/schedule/3750

Here is a blog post that I think clarifies why this conjecture had remained unsolved: https://almostsure.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/the-gaussian-cor...

There is also a 'companion' article on arxiv that provides a clear presentation of Royen's proof: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.08776

Amusing trivia from the article: Geoffrey Hinton is the great-great-grandson of George Boole.

Apparently, they have managed to recruit Zoubin Ghahramani [to lead their machine learning efforts] despite the recent mess. While this particular recruitment may not be representative of the broader reception of Uber employees in the job market, choosing to stay at Uber for _professional reasons_ does not seem to be a bad idea.

Uber appoints Zoubin Ghahramani as chief scientist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876497

Piggybacking on the discussion about reasoning: I found the recently proposed 'argumentative theory of reasoning' quiet insightful and provocative with significant implications for belief formation (as well as scientific methodology).

Here is an excerpt from the researchers who proposed the theory:

> the argumentative theory of reasoning—proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts—more plainly, to argue with others.

Citation: https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativeth...

Do you have any particular example or domain in mind?

Regarding the automatic analysis, Automatic Statistician (Tenenbaum & Ghahramani et al.), which is supposed to automate / assist the exploratory analysis, comes to mind. Not sure if it'd be fair but I tend to lump some of the probabilistic programming - such as BayesDB - platforms into the same bucket. While these are exploratory tools, they are ideally (pragmatically) meant to help identify associations and context whereby correlation is highly suggestive of causation.

Another area of interest: one of the comments below mentioned adaptive clinical trial design. I know that Bayesian trials are intensively implemented in some cancer research centers such as MD Anderson (off-topic: curious to what extent IBM Watson was used as part of this protocol). I would love to know whether adaptive trials are increasingly popular or widely used in pharma industry.

Thank you, I was not aware of this book. I am currently working my way through the Counterfactuals and Causal Inference (2nd), and I would definitely recommend this book (arguably over JP's Causality) to those who are looking for a comprehensive, introductory text.

Indeed! My bad, thanks for pointing it out.

I have seen an earlier version of this book recommended here on HN, and thought that some might be delighted to know that there is a revised version available to download.