Stats for nerds
5recommend
6mentions
6people
2012–2025years
83% recommend17% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- imo, The idea of a cause is a logical concept of containment when used in theories. A causes B means the phenomena represented by A implies the phenomena represented by B. So, causation is a device of our symbolization and understanding of the world rather than anything fundamentally out there. this is of course a controversial view.
Causality eventually demands a "theory" for full explanatory power and understanding. Theories have premises, involve inference, and have predictions. Otherwise, we get ad-hoc models of phenomena via observations which is a great start, but ends up as an oversimplification. X causes Y but, what caused X or why did X cause Y and not Z ? models represent phenomena while theories explain them. we start with models, and then our curiosity eventually leads to a theory. refer [1] for a great read from a physicist turned quant.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Models-Behaving-Badly-Confusing-Illus...
- - Rationality From AI to Zombies (huge collection of essays about (rationality,intelligence,quantum physics,bayesian probability,philosophy...) that can be read on lesswrong.com)
-Intuition Pumps and other Thinking Tools
-Sapiens
-Edward.O Wilson Letters to a young scientist
-Cédric Villani Birth of a Theorem
-Emanuel Derman Models Behaving Badly
-Letters From A Stoic by Seneca
-Mathematics it's contents methods 3 Volumes (Aleksandrov et al.)
-Nick Bostrom Superinteligence
-The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
- Other people that used that quote is Emanuel Derman. He's an interesting character (PHD in theoretical physics, Ex-Goldman Sachs Partner). He is the author of Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life [1] and wrote a great paper on Metaphors, Models & Theories. I did a review of his paper [2], but some highlights:
Theories: Tell us what something is. According to Derman, theories “deal with the world on its own terms, absolutely.”
Models: Tell us what something is partially like. According to Derman, models are “reductions in dimensionality that always simplify and sweep dirt under the rug.”
Metaphors: Models can be compared to Metaphors. Metaphors are relative descriptions that compare it to something similar, but better understood through theories or real life applications.
"A model is a metaphor, not the thing itself. Good metaphors compare something we don’t understand, to something we think we do. Based on this, a model is simple and of limited applicability when compared to the real thing as it focuses on some parts rather than the whole. It is a caricature which overemphasizes some features at the expense of others."
[1] http://bit.ly/dermanmodels [2] https://medium.com/pnr-paper/metaphors-models-theories-fb406...
- Based on the books mentioned in your post, I assume you are looking for light readings on statistics and probability. You might enjoy following books.
* Darrell Huff, Irving Geis How to Lie With Statistics
* Ian Ayres Super Crunchers Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart
* David Salsburg The Lady Tasting Tea How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
* Emanuel Deman, Models Behaving Badly
* Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson The Misbehavior of Markets A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
* Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
- http://www.amazon.com/Models-Behaving-Badly-Confusing-Illusi...
"A model...[is] really much more of a metaphor, an attempt to find an analogy between something you want to understand and something to really do understand, either heuristically or by a theory."
from http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/03/derman_on_theor.htm... - very good interview.
- Here's the important part of the article:
There are skeptics, too. Emanuel Derman, who was among the first physicists to work on Wall Street, doubts that biologists possess secret sauce for investing. Derman rose to lead the quant risk strategies group in his 17 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He found that as physicists applied their expertise of the laws of motion, atoms and mathematics to investing, their models didn’t work nearly as well as they did in a lab.
Newton’s law of gravity hasn’t changed for eons, Derman said, but human behavior in markets changes all the time, wreaking havoc on even the best models made by scientists.
“I’ve developed a lot of skepticism about anyone bringing their expertise from one field to another,” said Derman, author of the book “Models.Behaving.Badly” and a Columbia University professor of financial engineering. “They say stocks are like atoms, or like genes. But stocks are not atoms or genes. There is a resemblance, but ultimately they are very different.”
