The three traits that turn ordinary people into modern superheroes

It turns out Hollywood was right all along. Besides making great documentaries about space like The Martian, movie studios are also remarkably on point about superheroes. They just got the powers real people use to transform into legends slightly wrong. Rather than flight or invincibility, real superheroes share three traits:

1. The ability to teach themselves
2. Speaking and writing persuasively
3. Technical literacy

Take Elon Musk, founder and/or CEO of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, Neuralink, and the Boring Company with a net worth north of $20 billion. How was Musk able to create Tesla, the first successful American car startup in over one hundred years which, at times, has been worth more than GM despite selling less than 1/100 the number of cars? How was he able to start and keep alive SpaceX, a private spaceflight company that started out with three disastrous failures? Simple: Musk used all of these superpowers better than other any human alive.

Make (and lose) fake fortunes while learning real Python

Trying to predict the stock market is an enticing prospect to data scientists motivated not so much as a desire for material gain, but for the challenge.We see the daily up and downs of the market and imagine there must be patterns we, or our models, can learn in order to beat all those day traders with business degrees. Naturally, when I started using additive models for time series prediction, I had to test the method in the proving ground of the stock market with simulated funds. Inevitably, I joined the many others who have tried to beat the market on a day-to-day basis and failed. However, in the process, I learned a ton of Python including object-oriented programming, data manipulation, modeling, and visualization. I also found out why we should avoid playing the daily stock market without losing a single dollar (all I can say is play the long game)!

One day vs 30 years: which would you rather put your money on?

Viewing real world statistics skeptically

It’s surprising the insights waiting to be discovered deep within the mass of emails we all receive. While mindlessly browsing my inbox, I briefly scanned a message from my University’s Study Abroad office with the following info about the benefits of studying overseas:

What immediately caught my eye was those figures in the 90s — clearly, studying abroad makes you irresistible to grad schools and employers. I was surprised at just how large the academic and career benefits were that came as a result of studying in another country. My second thought was: it’s too bad I didn’t choose to take advantage of those benefits, and I quickly archived the email and before I came to regret any further life decisions. However, something about the information stuck with me. I have been trying to take more time to consciously think through claims and statistics in this fake-news dominated age, and while this wasn’t on the same society-degrading level, something seemed off about the conclusion I had drawn. A few days later while listening to a data skeptic podcast it hit me: I had assumed that studying abroad caused students to have better grades and career prospects, when all the statistics showed was that the two were correlated.

A review of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Why is is that we would be shocked to find someone 55 feet tall, but we routinely hear of people making $5.6 million a year or more and think nothing of it? The former represents an individual only 10 times the average height, while the latter has a salary 100 times the average household income in the US. As Nassim Taleb explains in The Black Swan, these two quantities comes from fundamentally different realms. The first is generated by the natural world, what Taleb refers to as Mediocristan, while the second is a product of the recent technological world created by humans, Extremistan.

For nearly all of human history, we have occupied Mediocristan, where quantities are normally distributed with few values far from the average and no extreme values. Almost all phenomenon in nature behave in this manner: there are no animals that live for 10,000 years, no trees miles tall, and no humans that can run 100 miles per hour. It is only in the past century as a result of science and technological advances that we have constructed Extremistan, where outlying values such as Bill Gates’ net worth of $80 billion (about 300,000 times the average American net worth) or books sales of 500 million (the first Harry Potter) are entirely possible. These professions, computer software and creative fields, are examples of jobs that are infinitely scalable, that is, the amount of gain added does not scale linearly with the amount of effort put in. If J.K. Rowling writes a successful book that sells 10,000 copies, she does not have to put in 10 times as much effort to write a book that sells 100,000 copies. She can add another zero to the total sales with a minimal amount of effort. In contrast, traditional professions, such as baking scale linearly. In order for a baker to sell another loaf of bread, he has to bake another loaf and 10 times more sales means making 10 times as many loaves. As Taleb points out, if you want to become very wealthy, choose an infinitely scalable profession rather than a linearly scaling one where you are paid in direct proportion to the amount of hours worked.

Exploring financial data with object-oriented programming and additive models

It’s easy to get carried away with the wealth of data and free open-source tools available for data science. After spending a little bit of time with the quandl financial library and the prophet modeling library, I decided to try some simple stock data exploration. Several days and 1000 lines of Python later, I ended up with a complete stock analysis and prediction tool. Although I am not confident (or foolish) enough to use it to invest in individual stocks, I learned a ton of Python in the process and in the spirit of open-source, want to share my results and code so others can benefit.

Now more than ever