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Friday, December 17, 2010
Being right by being wrong
Fun article to read.
If you’re a politician, admitting you’re wrong is a weakness, but if you’re an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you’re always right, then you aren’t getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.
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If you could hear someone else interviewed about being wrong, who would it be?Last night I saw Jeff Ma speak—he’s the MIT student who did the card-counting in Vegas, which the movie 21 was about. He talked about one of his first days betting and how there are certain situations where the statistics say, “If you’re in this position, you should double your bet.” So Ma finds himself in that position and doubles his bet and then the dealer deals himself 21 and Ma loses $50,000. Then a couple of hands later he was in the same situation and now he’s down $100,000. So he went back to his room and said, “What did I do wrong?” He thought about it and said, “I didn’t do anything wrong; the statistics are what they are and I did the exact right play for the statistics. The dealer just got lucky.” So he went back and kept playing the same strategy and ended up winning $70,000 or something over the weekend. He makes the point that if you’re making the right decision, even if you get a bad result, you’re not really wrong.
And if I could interview a dead guy—and automatically improve my French, while we’re wishing for the impossible—I’d take [French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon] Laplace. I think that he deserves most of the credit for Bayesian probability theory, and most of Bayes’ fame comes from having his name on the theorem, not for actually doing the work.
Glove-slap: NaOH.
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