Recently, I unexpectedly encountered a justice system in the USA.
What conclusions can be drawn from this:
I continue developing my news reader: feeds.fun. To gather information and people together, I created several resources where you can discuss the project and find useful information:
So far, there is no one and nothing there, but over time, there will definitely be news and people.
If you are interested in this project, join! I'll be glad to see you and will try to respond quickly to all questions.
Nate Silver — the author of "The Signal and the Noise" — is widely known for his successful forecasts, such as the US elections. It is not surprising that the book became a bestseller.
As you might guess, the book is about forecasts. More precisely, it is about approaches to forecasting, complexities, errors, misconceptions, and so on.
As usual, I expected a more theoretical approach, in the spirit of Scale [ru], but the author chose a different path and presented his ideas through the analysis of practical cases: one case per chapter. Each chapter describes a significant task, such as weather forecasting, and provides several prisms for looking at building forecasts. This certainly makes the material more accessible, but personally, I would like more systematics and theory.
Because of the case studies approach, it isn't easy to make a brief summary of the book. It is possible, and it would even be interesting to try, but the amount of work is too large — the author did not intend to provide a coherent system or a short set of basic theses.
Therefore, I will review the book as a whole, provide an approximate list of prisms, and list some cool facts.
I bought "The Net And The Butterfly" by mistake when I was in St. Petersburg about 5 years ago and organized a book-shopping day. I bought about 10 kilograms of books :-D, grabbed this one on autopilot without reading the contents. I thought the book would be about the network effect and the spreading of ideas, but it turned out to be about how to "manage" a brain relying on one of the neural networks in it. Which network? For the book and its content it does not matter at all.
My opinion of "The Net And The Butterfly" is twofold. On the one hand, I cannot deny its usefulness, on the other… the material could have been presented 100 times better and 3 times shorter. Sometimes, the authors walk on thin ice and risk falling into information peddling/marketing fraud.
Nice to meet you, friends!
My name is Aliaksei, but feel free to call me Tiendil — it is my nickname for the last 20 years or so :-)
A few words about me:
You can find more about me:
This is my first blog post in English, but not the first one in general. I have blogged in Russian for a long time and have always wanted to share my thoughts with the English-speaking world. At last, I found some time to adapt my blog, and here we are!
Most of the future posts will be bilingual (English & Russian). Also, with time, I'll translate my most interesting old posts.
Once again, nice to meet you! Feel free to contact me by any means.