1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
I always appreciate it when other data scientists talk about making their data tell a story that upper management already decided they wanted confirmed for them. Makes me feel less alone. Thank you
I wish this was more widely understood. People act like "the data tells us" actually holds some weight. And of course there are places where something is so obvious that of course it's reflected in the data. But anything subtle is probably just as subjective as giving an opinion. The more degrees of freedom, the more "the data" can fit whatever somebody wants.
In light of all that, making decisions by gut feelings or intuition is, if nothing else, at least honest, and probably just as good an approach as anything else.
> In light of all that, making decisions by gut feelings or intuition is, if nothing else, at least honest, and probably just as good an approach as anything else.
I went down on this thought once, and I became antiscience. Reasoning-wise I only trust what I can understand, simple highschool level reasoning. Anything that I can't understand, and is more sophisticated than a highschool level reasoning I don't trust. I mean, sure, there are facts that need complicated statistical methods. But I can't check them, I don't trust authority, (and probably they are more often wrong than right anyway, because they need results or they starve to death), so I reject them/I am ambivalent.
> there are facts that need complicated statistical methods
Like what? There are ideas that need causal reasoning, or trust that it exists behind things you don't fully understand. Statistics, especially anything higher order, end up being basically just rhetoric, outside maybe of some very narrow claims.
If someone tells you you need a bunch or statistics to understand something, they're almost certainly trying to persuade you without having a strong enough logical footing to just explain themselves.
And science isn't a religion or a position, you can't really be for or against it. That should be a starting point.
For example, understanding why certain estimators give you the average treatment effect on treated individuals rather than the average treatment effect on everyone is easier if you understand the mathematics of it. But you need to know basic probability and mathematical statistics.
Causal mediation analysis is similar if you want to understand what assumptions you really need to make to talk about the mechanisms through which a treatment effect acts on the outcome.
I rest my case. If someone told me that the only way I was going to notice something is with the stuff you are saying, I'd be pretty reluctant to trust them.
If you're talking about optimizing around some agreed upon thing, sure I can understand the idea of using some more complex statistical analysis (though I might question the incremental value).
I am not saying that a convincing answer has to be convoluted. But a simple answer is not always the right one.
To understand when a simple answer is unlikely to be correct, you do benefit from understanding the mathematics. There’s a reason that people with doctorates in statistics spend 8 to 10 years in school to learn how to contribute to it.
I don't think intuition tells us much. What we have are perceived interests we seek to rationalise.
If we were all to iteratively acknowledge our interests to a greater degree then we could probably learn a lot more from data but I think there is a strong message in our society that self interest is wrong and so people dedicate great energy to pretending that their self interest does not exist.
Unfortunately the case -- you just have to be honest and say "no it can't do that" when it can't. The "impedance mismatch" between managers/stakeholders and contributors is an ever renewing source of BS for many of us.
I can offer some insight onto this, as I used to be in close proximity to a friend who worked in the concession group at the LAX version monitoring this policy.
It was called the 18% price protection policy program where concessionaires had to quarterly list 3 comparable vendors for each item sold showing how their item offered was only less than 18% above that of those found within a 10 mile radius of the airport. In reality, it was too much asked of low skilled and low margin vendors with power to enforce not being exercised due to managements prioritization of more pressing matters.
In reality, there was little by way of enforcement, it was too much regulation to pass down to those vendors even, with that being only 1 of 5-10 policies an excel sheets they had to provide quarterly data on, entered manually. They vendors had so much turnover themselves and employees who didn't specialize in providing that sort of data, they would always fall behind with all the policies and regulation they had to comply with that enforcing it on them was hollow and without power. And when they did provide data, it was poorly formatted, required man hours to read and research and in the end might not even have been a valid "comparable" data that was provided, but, to verify their data provided would require manual audits of physically inspecting 10-100 individual comparables that were given that it was a nightmare, and thus, never got done. There wasn't enough staff at either the vendor nor the airport authority to properly see the implementation of the price protection policy.
The city could technically use its power to make it a priority, but, there were always much more urgent matters at same position that it was a on the back burner, it seemed.
What does "used to be in close proximity to a friend" mean? I mean your comment is pretty detailed, down to the formatting of Excel documents and the internal workings of the regulators. People have conversations with friends, but rarely to this degree of detail, kind of makes it sound like you're just making shit up. Or, that you yourself are the "friend."
If the internet is good for one thing, it's for producing entirely trustworthy and accurate tales based on what a random poster's "friend once told me a while back".
This isn't the only reason someone might go into detail, but there's something called "infodumping". It's when autistic people like myself socialize by describing something we're interested in in depth. Some people have autistic friends.
Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate? I'm personally an occasional tourist to Japan only and wish I could find a course in "tourist essentials" or "Tourist fluent" Japanese
> Can you share with us the main differentiator your product has over some behemoth like Google translate?
You might as well ask how a screwdriver is different from an apple. (:
Google Translate, is, well, a translator. You give it text, and it translates it. That's it. My site's for people who want to actually learn Japanese to fluency, with a particular focus on media-based immersion.
For example, is there a Japanese anime you'd like to watch without subtitles? I can probably help with that; I have vocabulary lists for many shows, and the site can teach you (through flashcards/spaced repetition) most of the words you'll need to be able to understand it.
I also have a plugin for the mpv video player where (if you load appropriate Japanese subtitles for the show you're watching) the plugin will color-code all of the words according to whether you know them or not, and you'll also have access to a popup dictionary where you can just hover your mouse over any of the words and see their definition. You can also use the plugin to make vocabulary flashcards with the screenshot + audio from what you're watching; demo video by one of my users: https://streamable.com/ww6x0e
I can keep on going as there's a lot more, but I'll stop here! It's probably not appropriate for someone who just wants to learn a little bit of Japanese for tourism purposes.
This is wild for a side project?!?! I wish you had something like this for Dutch. I recently moved from America and something like this would be phenomenal. I can see why you have so many patron donations!
I wonder if /how that will change now after this.