Inside the Black Box is a series of short videos in which I explain how data, software and algorithms are influencing many aspects of our lives. Subscribe to the playlist here.
The fourth clip of this series takes off from this article by Washington Post columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, who announced that he has ditched the Chrome browser, switching to Firefox. Why did he do it? Should you?
[P.S. Oops. After posting this, I realized I haven't realized clip #3. So the big-tech surveillance will have to wait.]
The third clip of this series looks at the fall of the "depression gene". Twenty years ago, data analysts were sure they found a promising gene variant that is helpful to predict depression. Then it fell apart. How?
It's an important lesson for us all today as we dig into piles of observational data. There are a host of reasons for discoveries to not replicate from the lab to real life. One of them is the curse of dimensionality. I use the famous "birthday problem" to examine this issue.
We sure hope it doesn't take 20 years to realize one has made a false discovery!
Click here to see the clip.
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