You Can See Everything
I watched the movie You Can See Everything last week, and I highly recommend it. It stands on its own as a monumental portrait of today’s post-post-truth world. The genius of the movie is that everything is clearly stated in…
Metrics Aren’t Permanent
The past couple posts highlighted two common but nuanced issues that cause metrics to be misjudged or misinterpreted: (1) a representational gap between what is measured and what is “ground truth reality”, or what one wishes to actually measure; and…
Goodhart’s Law
It struck me as somewhat ironic, and sometimes uncomfortable, that many times I had to tell stakeholders not to trust a metric that I helped define. As a data scientist, this was always a tricky tightrope to walk. While you…
The Metric is Not the Product
The bulk of my time as a data scientist was spent on what we called Evaluation, which entailed designing experimentation platforms, helping teams run and analyze experiments, and defining success metrics. All in service of answering the question: “how do…
Hello Again, World
(FYI, I’m intending to cross-post upcoming entries to Substack, in case it’s easier to follow there: https://seantime.substack.com/) I recently took a break from working on Google Search, after 15 years as a data scientist and most recently as an acting…