Field note · December 18, 2023
Reader question — 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.
Reader question on Frame the problem, then beat a stupid baseline, and the answer belongs somewhere more findable than an email.
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 question was, roughly, "when does this stop applying?" — which is the right question and the one lessons routinely fail to answer. Every technique has a range of validity, and stating it is what separates a lesson from a recipe.
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.