Recent quotes:

horses for courses - Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"

All of which means that horse racing data has an absolutely massive curse of dimensionality.  If you’re trying to estimate a model to use historical race data to tell you which horse out of a field of eight or nine is likely to show up fastest, then you’d have to, at the very least, take into account the course, distance, “going” (ground conditions) and class of each race.  Since there are also interaction effects (different courses will suit different horses depending on whether it’s muddy or dry, for example), then you’re eating up degrees of freedom very quickly.  Added to which, there’s a curse of non-stationarity.  You want lots of data points to deal with your curse of dimensionality, but very few horses have more than a dozen starts in a season.  So the more data you collect, the older some of it is.  And a lot can change for a horse in a year – injuries, changes of trainer and the simple effect of maturity and aging.
#managing #statistics #projection - backofmind.substack.com

The hazards of second-guessing | Chicago Booth Review

Overall, the participants asked to analyze whether their first guess had been too high or low performed worse on their second prediction—that is, their second guesses were more likely to be more extreme and thus less likely to be in the correct direction relative to the first. The results held across several experiments, both online and in person. The researchers also wanted to test the phenomenon in a situation without the boundaries of percentages, so they asked another group of participants to look at stock prices for 10 well-known companies and predict what the prices would be two weeks in the future. As before, one group analyzed their first guess before making a second one—and once again, this group produced second guesses that were more extreme than the first, making the average less accurate.  Asking people explicitly to evaluate their first guess may cause them to use that first guess as a reference point, which can lead to a second guess that’s further from the actual target, the researchers explain.
#managing #projection - review.chicagobooth.edu

The world as a mirror

Like an emotional movie projector, "projecting" refers to a behavior in which we project our own internal beliefs, feelings or experiences onto someone else when we feel they are inappropriate.  Shadow material is especially susceptible to being projected onto someone else.  Look around you?  Does you view everyone as a cheat?  A gossip?  A liar?  Does everyone around you seem angry?  Unhappy?  Fearful?  You may be seeing your own shadow projected onto others. The Mexican culture has a wonderful saying which translates roughly into English as, "The lion believes that all are like him".  That about sums it up.
#psychology #projection - kellevision.com