Field note · November 10, 2023
Cutting a lesson down — Frame the problem, then beat a stupid baseline
Most model projects fail at framing, not at modelling. The second most common failure is not knowing what "good" would have been without a model at all.
A note from writing Frame the problem, then beat a stupid baseline, which took three passes to get to something short.
Most model projects fail at framing, not at modelling. The second most common failure is not knowing what "good" would have been without a model at all.
The hard part of writing this was cutting it. The first version covered every case; the useful version covers the case you hit on a Tuesday and names the rest in a sentence. Completeness is a property of reference material, not of teaching material, and confusing the two produces something nobody finishes.
It sits in the Modelling, honestly module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.
Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows Causal claims when you cannot randomise and leads into Validation that matches deployment, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.
Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.