Skip to main content

Puzzles

 





Never shied from taking on puzzles,
for they stirred my curious brain.

Then I faced a puzzle my mind could not solve,
which made me turn inward and trust my heart.

But my heart didn't take the mystery too well,
it broke slowly, piece by piece.

As I looked at those pieces, I wondered,
maybe some puzzles aren't meant to be solved

or maybe I should stop thinking about puzzles,
and just go to bed now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solving Customer Churn with a hammer!

Learning when data should take a back seat and give way to domain knowledge is a valuable skill. Suppose you built a machine learning model on the data of your customers to predict churn risk. Now that you have a risk score for each customer, what do you do next? Do you filter the top n% based on the risk and send them a coupon with a discount in the hopes that it will prevent churn? But what if price is not the factor driving churn in many of these customers? Customers might have been treated poorly by customer service, which drove them away from your company's product.  Or there might have been an indirect competitor's product or service that removes the need for your company's product altogether (this happened to companies like Blockbuster and Kodak in the past!) There could be a myriad of factors, but you get the point! Dashboards and models cannot guide any company's strategic actions directly. If companies try to use them without additional context, more often tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

What is SUTVA for A/B testing?

Imagine if person B’s blood pressure reading depends on whether person A receives the blood pressure medicine in a randomized controlled trial. This will be violating Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) SUTVA states that the treatment received by an individual should not influence the outcome we see for another individual during the experiment. I know the initial example sounded absurd, so let me try again. Consider LinkedIn A/B testing a new ‘dislike’ reaction for its users, and the gods of fate chose you to be part of the initial treatment group that received this update. Excited after seeing this new update, you use this dislike reaction on my post and send a screenshot to a few of your connections to do the same, who are coincidentally in the control group that did not receive the update. Your connections log in and engage with my posts to use this dislike reaction, but later get disappointed as this new update is not yet available to them. The offices of LinkedIn are tr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Curing writer's block with sunk cost fallacy

I paid $20 to renew this blog's domain in July. But the truth is, I had been suffering from writer's block ever since the start of this year and hadn’t posted a single thing. At one point, I was ready to give up on the blog altogether, but a voice in my head kept reminding me of all the time and money I’d already invested in this blog. So, this week, I sat down to write this imperfect, patchy article—about none other than that voice itself.  Let me start with a classic scenario where you might have also encountered this voice. Suppose you’re at an Italian restaurant and ordered some pasta and tiramisu. After finishing the pasta, you realize you’re full, and there’s no way your stomach can handle that delicious tiramisu sitting right in front of you. But then, that beautiful brain of yours reminds you that you’ll be paying for the tiramisu whether you eat it or not. In a desperate attempt to avoid wasting money, you reluctantly eat two quick bites. And just like that, my frien...
Post a Comment
Read more