ML is not magic. If you can't run controlled experiments then it isn't actually very easy to make confident recommendations about improvements to business processes.
comparing aggregate rates of household formation vs housebuilding doesn't tell you very much as household formation is dependent on housing supply.
in the absence of supply constraints, if the price goes up this creates an incentive to build more houses, which will balance out any increased demand. there is also good research that shows supply constraints do matter in the UK - http://personal.lse.ac.uk/hilber/hilber_wp/Hilber_Vermeulen_...
it's hard to understand how this actually gets used for those of us not in enterprise IT. would be great to see an example of a real project using Mule (or similar products).
"His many fans highlight the effect of Taleb's thinking as they speak like Renfield discussing Count Dracula:
”excellent; it's a must read ... I'll refrain from demonstrating my foolishness and ignorance by trying to interpret any of them in this forum.”
“Those who understand the book will refrain from summarizing its message.”
They sound like a cult of scared guru worshipers."
"Taleb’s article implies that Better Angels consists of 700 pages of fancy statistical extrapolations which
lead to the conclusion that violent catastrophes have become impossible. He mistakenly refers to this as
“The Long Peace.” In fact “The Long Peace” (the term is John Gaddis’s) refers specifically to the welldocumented
post-1945 decline of wars among great powers and developed states. And the chapter with
that title is one of six that describe historical reductions in rates of violence. Another chapter discusses
the more tentative but still appreciable declines in civil war and terrorism since the end of the Cold War.
The remaining four pertain to other kinds of violence: tribal raiding and feuding, violent personal crime,
barbaric practices such as slavery and torture-executions, and violence on smaller scales such as
lynching, rape, spousal abuse, spanking, hate crimes, and cruelty to animals. The book makes it clear
that these developments obey very different statistical processes than those governing wars and
terrorist attacks; not even Taleb, presumably, would expect a sudden, massive, unpredictable jump in
human sacrifice, slave auctions, sodomy laws, or debtor’s prisons. So even if, as Taleb seems to believe,
the danger from major war has not declined, we would have plenty of other declines of violence to
explain. It’s an open question whether there are any common denominators behind these various
declines. Better Angels considers some possibilities, while making it clear that these declines do not
constitute a single phenomenon"