VARIANCE

MLB spent 7 years running a real-world experiment to automate the strike zone — and it nearly broke baseball. In this episode, we dig into what a Cornell research team found when they traced every design decision in the Automated Ball-Strike System: the strike zone was never what the rulebook said. What looks like a simple binary rule turned out to be 150 years of accumulated human judgment — and...

In this special second episode, the roles reverse as I share some stories from my extensive experimentation background across tech giants like eBay, Apple, and Yahoo. This is a cut from my first episode with Ishan where Ishan asked me about my experience. Discover the statistical challenges that plagued major experimentation platforms - from misaligned alpha thresholds and rampant false positives...

Welcome to the first episode of Variance, a podcast where I explore experimentation, basic statistics, and data science career through conversations with industry experts. In this episode, I sit down with Ishan Goel, former Associate Head of Data Science at VWO (Visual Website Optimizer), where he led data science research and helped build VWO's new stats engine. Topics covered include: 🟣 Tr...