You likely remember the spelling rule, “I before E, except after C.” It’s been taught in English grammar textbooks at least as far back as 1866 and persists in modern school texts. In fact, it’s been called the “supreme, and for many people solitary, spelling rule.” The rule is supposed to help with the complexity…
You should always get the bigger pizza. No, this isn’t some bigger-is-better American standard where size matters more than quality or consistency. It’s not because everyone loves pizza so you might as well get more of it (it’s the glutamate we find so irresistible). And I’m definitely not using the number of slices rule that…
Whenever an expert makes a claim they cannot support with data, I’m reminded of the firewood fallacy. Firewood fallacy is a term I coined earlier in my career after being frustrated by how many organizations suffer from group think. Decisions are often made based on institutional knowledge or hearsay, rather than independent research or data….
Shrinkflation happens when companies keep the price of an overall package the same while reducing the size or quantity of the items in the package. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation. The first use of the term is often attributed to Pippa Malmgren. Shrinkflation is a sneaky way to combat…
For many years, my routine was a Sunday hike followed by a Sunday blog. For a variety of reasons, both my hiking and blogging have become erratic. After skipping yet another Sunday hike, I was surprised to find that I still had exceeded 10,000 steps per day for the past week. 10,000 is the number…
Early in my career, my departmental VP hired a well-known management consulting firm to diagnose why an important project had failed. The management consultants used a technique called “5 Whys” to get past discussions of the failed outcomes and try to unearth the root causes. As the name implies, the technique is based on asking…
After writing about several examples of bias from insensitivity to sample size, a former colleague asked whether I thought performance in the workplace was subject to the same bias. She observed people were sometimes rewarded or even promoted for high performance, even if that performance was sporadic rather than sustained. She asked: Shouldn’t the promotion…
The law of small numbers (or hasty generalization) is the tendency to jump to a conclusion without enough evidence. In statistics, it’s called bias from insensitivity to sample size – generalizing from a limited number of events (a sample) selected from a much larger number of events (the population). For example, if a mutual fund…
One rainy afternoon I was watching a re-run of a detective show when I began to think about the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt.” How much doubt, I wondered, is reasonable? If you have an analytics background, you might fall prey to the temptation of trying to quantify the doubt. Using the language of statistics,…
These three laws, simple as they are, form much of the basis of probability theory. Properly applied, they can give us much insight into the workings of nature and the everyday world. – Leonard Mlodinow That quote is from Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The book contains examples as…