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Dopamine Is Not a Fuel Tank: Reward, Habit and the Myth of the Dopamine Reset
Dopamine is not a reserve of pleasure that modern life depletes. It participates in motivation, learning, salience and reward prediction. Taking a break from...
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Negative Controls: Measuring an Effect That Cannot Exist
The comparison says adopters score 0.96 higher, and the truth is 0.30. Run the same comparison on an outcome the feature cannot possibly affect and it report...
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Robust and Stochastic Optimization Answer Different Uncertainty Questions
Optimization under uncertainty is not one method. Expected-cost models, chance constraints, robust counterparts and distributionally robust models encode dif...
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Equivalence Testing: Proving a Model Is No Worse
The cheaper model scores a non-significant p of 0.4 against the incumbent and is declared "no worse". With 50 test cases, a model that is truly 1.5 points wo...
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Hawkes Processes Turn Events Into Causes of Future Events
A Poisson process assumes that an event does not change the future event rate. A Hawkes process makes the opposite mechanism explicit: each event can create ...
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Preprocessing Inside the Fold: How Feature Selection Before Cross-Validation Invents Accuracy
One hundred samples, five thousand features, labels assigned by coin toss. Keep the ten features most correlated with the label, then cross-validate a logist...
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A High Silhouette Score Does Not Mean Your Clusters Are Real
Silhouette width is a useful geometric diagnostic, but it does not test whether a population contains distinct latent groups. A single uniform distribution, ...
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Multiple Comparisons in Model Monitoring: Why the Alerts Never Stop
Test two hundred features every morning at the 5 percent level and you get about ten alerts a day with nothing wrong. After a week nobody reads them, and the...
Read articleA Stool Sample Is Not a Diagnosis
Modern microbiome tests generate enormous amounts of data from a stool sample. When one homogenised sample was sent to seven companies, the reports shared th...
Read articleConcentration Inequalities Quantify How Random Sums Leave Their Typical Set
The law of large numbers says averages stabilize, and the central limit theorem describes their typical fluctuations. Concentration inequalities ask a differ...
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