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boston101 t1_j584fn2 wrote

I’ve been thinking of something I’d like you all opinion on.

As someone that works in the industry, as a data scientist/engineer, and writes/implements my ml models in production.

I think people would benefit to learn at a very basic level how their data is turned into decisions aka money. I also think showing them how data is structured for ML models to make those decisions would help.

What do you all think?

I’ll hazard a guess and say the older generations won’t take to this but if this was taught in schools even at a very basic level I think people would rethink their behaviors online.

(Making up this example) basic level could be as simple as:

data is gather and organized into spreadsheets.

We are trying to predict the next value in this one column. The values are “yes” or “no” for this column based on if you clicked a button. The rest of the columns represent your behavior on the website, like cursor speed. With math magic we can see what columns are most likely to influence the “yes” or “no” value in column we are trying to predict.

Finally as new data comes in we can use the math to see how you interactions on the website will predict if you click the button. Totally made up.

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js1138-2 t1_j58af2p wrote

Am I allowed to say that I hate websites that exhibit slow performance that seem to be the result of processing something other than my menu choices.

I leave the site and never return. I return to sites that enable snappy searches for stuff.

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boston101 t1_j58bkll wrote

Totally. Aren’t we doing the same math for feature elimination every day subconsciously?

Every decision has some sort of quick analysis going on and there are feature to every decision that one subconsciously weights to determine the decision to make.

For example, why chose the apple you picked? Did it have the shine or firmness you wanted but isn’t fundamentally in your attention? You made this decisions without even knowning.

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js1138-2 t1_j58dcbh wrote

Here’s a clue. I do a lot of searches for hardware and parts. When I find a website with a good static home page, I bookmark it. When I find a site that wiggles too much on the home page, I leave immediately.

Hope you can capture that.

You have one half second to fully display the home page, or I’m gone.

After that I’m a bit more forgiving.

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