Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagData analysis

observing the data
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Gary Smith’s New Book Reviewed in Washington Post

Smith argues that science itself is being undermined by the tools scientists use

Walter Bradley Center Senior Fellow Gary Smith’s book Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science was reviewed in The Washington Post today. Smith is a frequent contributor to Mind Matters and teaches economics at Pomona College. In his new book, Smith argues that science itself is being “undermined” by the tools scientists use. Reviewer Abby Ohlheister writes, Smith, an economist whose work often examines the misuse of data and statistics in a variety of disciplines, argues that the current crisis of trust in science falls at the intersection of three forces: disinformation, data torturing and data mining. Disinformation, as Smith writes, is “as old as the human race,” but accelerated in speed and reach alongside social media. Data Read More ›

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Technical price graph and indicator, red and green candlestick chart on blue theme screen, market volatility, up and down trend. Stock trading, crypto currency background.

Detecting BS Research: If It Seems Too Good to be True…

A recent Wall Street Journal article shows a near-perfect link between inflation and money. But a link that near-perfect raises suspicions

Two Johns Hopkins economists recently wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled, “Jerome Powell Is Wrong. Printing Money Causes Inflation.” Their argument is that Federal Reserve chair Powell is mistaken in his assertions that there is not a close relationship between money and inflation. As evidence, they offer the chart below, showing that the rate of inflation can be predicted almost perfectly from the rate of increase of M2, a broad measure of money. The authors explain: The theory rests on a simple identity, the equation of exchange, which demonstrates the link between the money supply and inflation: MV=Py, where M is the money supply, V is the velocity of money (the speed at which it circulates relative to total spending), P Read More ›

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Basketball scoring basket at a sports arena

Steph Curry Got Red Hot and Torched the “Hot Hand Fallacy”

Many statisticians dismiss remarkable streaks like his as the Hot Hand Fallacy. Are they right?
Is “Hot Hands” really a fallacy, as some claim? Steph Curry is arguably the greatest shooter in National Basketball Association (NBA) history. In 2020, during practice the day after Christmas, Curry demolished that record by making 105 consecutive 3-point shots. Read More ›
doctor with nurse looking at computer
doctor with nurse looking at computer at hospital

Bingecast: Data Analytics in Uganda

How can business intelligence and data analytics help medical centers in countries like Uganda care for patients and operate more efficiently? Robert J. Marks discusses data analytics, inefficiency, and medicine with Dr. Peter Kulaba. Read More ›
Polygonal art of Bullish vs Bearish

Ransacking Flawed Data For Hidden Treasures Seldom Ends Well

The Internet provides a firehose of data that financial market researchers can use to interpret human behavior—but cherry-picked patterns usually vanish

The explosion of data has vastly increased the number of coincidental patterns that can be discovered by tenacious researchers. If there are a relatively fixed number of useful patterns and the number of coincidental patterns is growing exponentially, then the ratio of useful patterns to useless patterns must necessarily be getting closer to zero every day.

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Demographic Change

Can The Machine TELL If You Are Psychotic or Gay?

No, and the hype around what machine learning can do is enough to make old-fashioned tabloids sound dull and respectable

Media often co-operate with researchers’ inflated claims about machine learning’s powers of discovery. An ingenious “creative” approach to accuracy enables the misrepresentation, says data analyst Eric Siegel.

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Computers’ Stupidity Makes Them Dangerous

The real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us

Many marketing decisions, medical diagnoses, and stock trades, loan and job applications, and election strategies are evaluated by computers. But, as my little experiment shows, the computer does not know whether a pattern is information or noise.

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Singer songwriter playing guitar

Time Passes, Love Fades, But What Does “It” All Mean?

Gary Smith and Bob Marks on AI's incomprehension, from IBM's Watson to the Clinton campaign's Ada

Gary N. Smith and Robert J. Marks discuss the inability of AI to understand puns, lyrics, context, or anything at all. From trading futures, predicting political outcomes, and parsing lyrics, the fundamental incomprehension of artificial intelligence is a key to understanding its limitations. Show Notes 02:30 | The AI Delusion by Oxford University Press 03:00 | The importance of knowing Read More ›

Animal clouds shape

How Business Intelligence Can Break the Data Deadlock

Companies today are awash in information. But which patterns are real? Which are cloud bunnies?

Contrary to the dogma of hypothesis testing, it is possible to do after-the-fact pattern analysis while limiting the probability of false positives.

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