Aneesh Sathe

Today’s product builders and data scientists shape the way people see the world. The analysis, plots, and UI we create are places where others dwell. Not merely occupy but live and harness the mental space we give them access to. Martin Heiddeger wrote Building Dwelling Thinking(archive.org) in his 1971 book, Poetry Language Thought. Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken

VMC: A Grammar for Visualizing Statistical Model Checks # Data Scientists check how well a statistical model fits observed data with numerical and graphical checks. Graphical checks have a huge range outside of the well knowns like Q-Q plots. Scientists are of course limited by their training and experience, and it’s not trivial to arrive at effective model checks. Both programmatic and visual plotting tools require significant effort to generate new plots increasing the friction to do proper checks. Work out of Jessican Hullman’s lab has created the VMC package (github) is a tool to easily …

Improving Research Through Safer Learning from Data # Another one of Frank Harrell’s posts. Given my day job, and the R&D background this one is quite close to home. As a team leader on the industry side one hopes to build a culture with the team that aligns scientific rigor with company goals. Any method, statistical or cultural (in this case both), that solves for this tension will get you the most bang for your buck.

Bayesian Thinking Talk (youtube) # Talk details from Frank Harrell’s blog - includes slides This beautiful talk about Bayesian Thinking by Frank Harrell should be essential material for scientists who are trained in frequentist methods. The talk covers the shortcomings of frequentist approaches, but more importantly the paths out of those quagmires are also shown. Frank discusses his journey to Bayesian stats in this blog post from 2017 which is also in the next section.

In 2025, blogs will be the last bastion of the Good Internet # Erik Hoel writes a work of maximalism succeeds when it triggers this property in the experiencer. You know that the whole is there, but you can’t see it all at once. You can only take it in sequentially. It is the awareness of an emergent form you, as a limited being with only a periscope for perception, cannot actually understand in full.