Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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Let us fully outsource this one to twitter!

Given my Garmin watch which syncs to Strava and Runtastic, and my Fitbit pedometer that sits on the other arm – and the fact that I connect these to MyFitnessPal where I log my food via my cellphone, I sort of see where he is coming from.  I love my shiny online badges.  Furthermore, I believe there is a term for this type of behavioural effect (which acts both as incentive and a form of precommitment depending on its design) – gamification.

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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Given I’m currently heavily heavily busy I’ll have to pull another comment from this Top 10 at 10

Economists don’t have universal truths, which is why I can’t understand how it is called a science.  Without those universal truths all you can expect is opinions.

Questions:

  1. Does science have universal truths?
  2. Is it true that without universal truths all we have are opinions?
  3. If 2 is true, then is it a lost cause – or perhaps is there a mechanism that makes some “opinions” relatively more valid/persuasive/closer to “truth”

Note:  I hope one of the other bloggers will cover off the National and Labour policy announcements – as I haven’t had any time to look at them at all – *wink wink*.  If it doesn’t happen during the week, I’ll see if I can manage something in the future.

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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On a recent Top 10 at 10 I did on interest.co.nz (about economists) came the following comment:

U know what economists will be replaced by in next 10 yrs?

Data Scientists!

Trust me on that.

Thoughts?

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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I saw the following pop up on twitter and had to share it:

So which is it, creativity or overfitting?  What do these really mean?

Matt Nolan

Discussion Tuesday

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I believe I had a Top 10 up on Rates Blog yesterday, defending economists (because why not).  I’ll post on that another day.  Here I’ll leave the floor open to criticising economists – although I’m not sure if I agree with the implied assumptions in today’s discussion Tuesday 😉

Economists largely base analysis on tautologies.   Given that they deal with synthetic variables (GDP, inflation) this is inappropriate and misleading.