what the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t


As you can see, the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are. People who perform worst at a task tend to think they’re god’s gift to said task, and the people who can actually do said task often display excessive modesty.

Source: what the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t | [citation needed]

 

Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design

Abstract:

Implicit in the drug-approval process is a trade-off between Type I and Type II error. We propose using Bayesian decision analysis (BDA) to minimize the expected cost of drug approval, where relative costs are calibrated using U.S. Burden of Disease Study 2010 data. The results for conventional fixed-sample randomized clinical-trial designs suggest that for terminal illnesses with no existing therapies such as pancreatic cancer, the standard threshold of 2.5% is too conservative; the BDA-optimal threshold is 27.9%. However, for relatively less deadly conditions such as prostate cancer, 2.5% may be too risk-tolerant or aggressive; the BDA-optimal threshold is 1.2%. We compute BDA-optimal sizes for 25 of the most lethal diseases and show how a BDA-informed approval process can incorporate all stakeholders’ views in a systematic, transparent, internally consistent, and repeatable manner.

Source: Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive?: A Bayesian Decision Analysis of Clinical Trial Design by Vahid Montazerhodjat, Andrew W. Lo :: SSRN

 

Oliver Sacks, Neurologist Who Wrote About the Brain’s Quirks, Dies at 82

“I am very tenacious, for better or worse,” he wrote in “A Leg to Stand On.” “If my attention is engaged, I cannot disengage it. This may be a great strength, or weakness. It makes me an investigator. It makes me an obsessional.”

Dr. Sacks explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” achieving a level of renown rare among scientists.

Source: Oliver Sacks, Neurologist Who Wrote About the Brain’s Quirks, Dies at 82 – The New York Times

 

Tufte in R

most powerful open-source statistical programming language – to replicate excellent visualisation practices developed by Edward Tufte. It’s not a novel approach – there are plenty of excellent R functions and related packages wrote by people who have much more expertise in programming than myself. I simply collect those resources in one place in an accessible and replicable format, adding a few bits of my own coding discoveries.Format

Source: Tufte in R

 

Why It’s Safe for Founders to Be Nice

I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something important: why it’s safe for startup founders to be nice people.

I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and isn’t too fussy about how. As I’ve written before, one of the things that has surprised me most about startups is how few of the most successful founders are like that. Maybe successful people in other industries are; I don’t know; but not startup founders. [1]

Source: Why It’s Safe for Founders to Be Nice