Brendan Foody: belief

Transcript context

…On your wish list — just to make this more concrete — you can have some kind of data. Forget about realism, you just get it for free. What is it you most want? Let’s say social sciences, forget about realism. Interesting. Forget about realism, social sciences I think that we tend to focus a lot on what’s economically valuable. If people have tests that the models are bad at, that map to a meaningful amount of economic value — and it could be an academic domain that can be applied to create a lot of value in other areas — that’s super exciting for us. Maybe a good heuristic is, if we could build a model that, without seeing this test and reading through it, could max out the test, how much economic impact would that add? Whatever test is able to measure that the best is most helpful. Maybe in medicine, it’s a test around how well the model is doing a certain diagnosis in a particularly difficult domain where we think the models can add a ton of impact. Maybe in economics, it’s areas of analysis and modeling of businesses that aren’t well codified but could meaningfully impact the way that we underwrite businesses. Those types of things are what’s going through my head. Let’s say it’s poetry. Let’s say you can get it for free, grab what you want from the known universe. What’s the data that’s going to make the models, working through your company, better at poetry?…

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