Given that I work on problems to improve relevance for Amazon Instant Videos, I have been watching amazing videos on amazing Amazon :).
I use the pretext of "learning" from different situations in movies to justify my conscience to spend time on watching videos vs reading books(Work in progress to get out of this justification :)). Based on a recommendation from my manager at Amazon, I started watching Vikings series. One sentence, in the series, which I thought was insightful was "Never fight a war, unless you know that you are going to win". The movie dialogue kept me thinking more. How do you know, what are your odds of winning without fighting a war ?.
History was made in battles where the odds of winning were lower, because of great leaders. Alexander, won over a much bigger Persian army with much smaller army. Babar, the Mughal empire founder won over a much bigger army. Do you attribute the wins to leaders or situations or armies ?. Does anyone fight a war when you know that you are going to loose ?. As a leader, how do you rationalize that you can win, despite the evidence of having less numbers or not having know how ?.
I think the decision making process of predicting winning a war has become easier over the generations. Let us say that you are planning a ab test to improve customer experience for movie recommendations how do you evaluate if your test is going to win before releasing it ? You can use anecdotal evidence, look at customer studies, run offline evaluations and get a direction sense of the weblab success. Even after doing all the diligence you still fail, specially when you are optimizing on multiple dimensions. How do you know you are getting close to that pareto optimal point in your weblab ?. Yes, You can potentially plot data offline and evaluate it, but you might still fail :).
I use the pretext of "learning" from different situations in movies to justify my conscience to spend time on watching videos vs reading books(Work in progress to get out of this justification :)). Based on a recommendation from my manager at Amazon, I started watching Vikings series. One sentence, in the series, which I thought was insightful was "Never fight a war, unless you know that you are going to win". The movie dialogue kept me thinking more. How do you know, what are your odds of winning without fighting a war ?.
History was made in battles where the odds of winning were lower, because of great leaders. Alexander, won over a much bigger Persian army with much smaller army. Babar, the Mughal empire founder won over a much bigger army. Do you attribute the wins to leaders or situations or armies ?. Does anyone fight a war when you know that you are going to loose ?. As a leader, how do you rationalize that you can win, despite the evidence of having less numbers or not having know how ?.
I think the decision making process of predicting winning a war has become easier over the generations. Let us say that you are planning a ab test to improve customer experience for movie recommendations how do you evaluate if your test is going to win before releasing it ? You can use anecdotal evidence, look at customer studies, run offline evaluations and get a direction sense of the weblab success. Even after doing all the diligence you still fail, specially when you are optimizing on multiple dimensions. How do you know you are getting close to that pareto optimal point in your weblab ?. Yes, You can potentially plot data offline and evaluate it, but you might still fail :).
