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1 year, 75 books, innumerable ideas

There’s one aspect of reading to make clear up front: I don’t think reading is an inherently better way to spend one’s time than any other activity. People who brag about how many books they read or say “I never watch tv” as if it makes them superior to people who do frustrate me because there is no reason to judge other people for how they choose to live their life.

Reading books is just another way to pass the time and you can waste time reading (see the books at the bottom of this rankings) just as you can watching television. For me, reading is how I spend my commute, get through exercise (listening to audiobooks), and the time right before I fall asleep, but, I don’t think this makes me better than people who watch movies or go out with friends instead. As a good rule, don’t judge people on how they spend their free time as long as they aren’t harming others.

I say this up front because I don’t want this article to sound like “here’s all the books I read which makes me really smart.” I try to write a few sentences about the books I read to process them, fitting them into my existing worldview, or updating my positions as needed (when the facts change, I change my opinions). While these are originally for myself, I’ve cleaned up my notes (you can access the raw version here) and made them public for anyone curious. This is more personal than my usual data science writing, but, comments, criticisms, and discussion is still encouraged here or on Twitter.

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30 ideas that changed my worldview

“The unexamined life is not worth living” is one of those of what is best described as “pseudo-profound dribble” (dribble being a family-friendly replacement for the correct term).

In reality, a life lived without looking back is totally worth living; in fact, those who live in the present are generally y/dp/1626254060). As I’ve written, thinking too much about the past can lead to regret as we second-guess our decisions that didn’t go well. There are even entire philosophies — Stoicism — about living in the present and letting go of the past. Those Socrates-quoting (it was probably Socrates who uttered this quote, at least according to Plato) people don’t even think about what they are saying, let alone realize how absurd the statement is.

So, now I’ve told you about the uselessness of reflection, it’s time to reflect on what I learned in 2018! I was originally going to use that Socrates quote to start this article and lecture you about the importance of looking backwards, before, in a plot twist, realizing it’s complete bunk. Fortunately, this about-face reinforces the one overarching idea I took away from 2018: we are all wrong about a lot of things a lot of the time, but, we can get less wrong.

While some may view this conclusion pessimistically — if we’re just going to be wrong, why learn anything at all? — I see it as a great opportunity. Yes, we are currently wrong about many of our beliefs — including our foundational ideas — but that just means we have the chance to get less wrong as we go through life. As we accumulate experiences and learn from data, we can gain a more accurate worldview and, as we’ll see, it turns out that worldview is almost always more optimistic than we originally thought.

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Where we should look to explain negative trends and how we can improve the world

Recently, this chart has started showing up in the news:

Trends in vaping and cigarettes (Source)

Originally appearing in a y solved this problem but evil cigarette companies are back at it selling poison to our youth.”

While there is nothing more appealing to humans than jumping on the moral outrage bandwagon, recently I’ve tried to stop myself from immediately falling in line by thinking rationally about where the blame for “bad” events should really be placed. If we take a minute to trace the actual source of these developments, we arrive at an answer both more mundane and more disturbing than our instinctual reaction has us believe.

(I’m not in any way trying to downplay the problem of e-cigarette use. The data are alarming — see for yourself — and I am worried about the potential undoing of decades of progress in public health. My point in this article is to show that blaming an “other” gets us no closer to solving the problem.)

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How to use repo2docker to automatically build Docker images

If you aren’t using docker for data science, then you probably should be. Docker is best thought of as a light virtual machine that runs images — environments — containing all the libraries, data, and code for a project. Docker is great for reproducible data science as it makes sharing code much easier: instead of sending code and requirements, you can make a Docker image and your project will just work on anyone else’s machine when they run your image. This solves the “dependency hell” issues that inevitably arise whenever people try to share code: “it worked on my machine” is now a phrase of the past thanks to Docker.

Even with the clear benefits of Docker, many data scientists still haven’t embraced the technology. Making a Docker image requires thedocs.io/en/latest/)`tool from Project Jupyter, the process to create a Docker image from a GitHub repository is now just a single line of code.

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Don’t let an imagined present be the enemy of enjoying reality

Case Western Reserve University, my alma mater, is known by its students primarily for being everyone’s second choice. Case is slightly less prestigious than the Ivies or MIT, and almost all the students were there because they had not got into their first selection. The effects of this were noticeable: claiming we had no school spirit was an understatement. There was no pride in the university and the only unifying force was a desire to be somewhere else.

The effects went beyond meager attendance at sporting events: it meant students spent four years — supposedly the best in their lives — wishing they were at a different school and regretting the choices that led them to Case. This phenomenon — wanting to have made different decisions in the past, and, as a consequence, not enjoying where you currently are — I call regretting the present.

We hear people express a regret for the present constantly in statements such as “if only I had taken that other job”, “if only I had not married my spouse”, or “I always think of how happy I would be in another city.” These capture the same basic idea: somewhere along the line these individuals made a decision they wish they could correct and they know they would be better off if only they had chosen differently.