Probability, Events, and People

I ran across this remark in a dark corner of the Internet to which I will not leave a link:

What (my critics) do is attempt to apply GENERAL statistics derived from a population of millions to their own individual situation despite the fact that such statistics are totally meaningless when applied to ONE SPECIFIC individual.

So close, and yet so far.

Probabilities apply to events, and it is individual events to which we cannot apply probabilities. A horse-race is a one-time event in terms of course, condition of the ground, horses and jockeys. It won’t be repeated. Probability needs repetition. The odds a bookie gives at a racetrack are not probabilities, since the bookie needs to make a Dutch book in his favour in order to make a living. But that’s an aside.

A individual person is not an individual event. A person is the site of many thousands of different events, from heartbeats and muscle twitches to things like crossing roads, dealing with customers, and eating food.

The statistics on food poisoning apply to a person because they eat many meals, each one of which is an event that might involve eating something that disagrees with them.

The statistics on divorce apply to an individual man because he has many opportunities to displease or disappoint his wife.

The twist is that most people will look at socio-economic variables to judge their probability of divorce, missing the point that nobody gets divorced because they are a prospering accountant, or a struggling session musician. They get divorced against because they do something that upsets their partner, and nobody ever records or measures those things. I suspect the correlation between social class, occupation and other such macro-variables, and actual divorce-causing behaviours, is actually fairly weak.

Statistics is difficult. The mathematics is surely horrible, but the conceptual difficulty is right at the start, in understanding how to model something, and how to apply the ideas.

Hiromi Uehara - Decando no Paraiso

I spend most of the afternoon feeling like I'd been hollowed out, abandoned my plans to do the 5:30 spin class and made my way home via the District Line because SouthWest Train industrial action. I made a banana-and-protein shake - the meal of champions - and ran across this track on You Tube.

I suddenly felt a whole lot better.

As will you if you listen all the way through. Spoiler: there's a drum solo, but it's actually pretty good.

Desafindao

Sis accused me of putting up a really sad song, in I Am A Rock from Simon and Garfunkel. So today, accept one of the coolest songs ever recorded, a stand-out on an album of stand-outs. The album is Getz/Gilberto, and the track is Desafinado. Listen very closely to Getz's solo. First time through you may feel there's nothing there, listen again and you will understand just how tightly phrased it is: nothing runs away, every note is blown just right.

 

To think at the time this was considered lightweight, after-dinner chill-out music. Well, it kinda is, and it is also some of the most musical jazz ever made, and of incredible quality. Heck, listen to the whole album.

Who Replaces Irreplacable Me?

Whenever I get a new supervisor, they always want to know how I can share my knowledge, or how other people can support me by doing something I do so that I can do something else. I listen politely and say that it would be a good idea.

Nothing happens. Never does. I think it never will.

I tell myself I have a rare combination of skills built up over decades, as well as a background in engineering, mathematics, and logic, as well as finance and accounting, marketing, pricing and operations, that let me do the job in the way I do. Also I can code: I’ve been doing it long enough to be able to work on the “need to nerd” principle.

This is not a combination of skills and knowledge anyone in their mid-20’s is going to have. And the chances of getting anyone who can actually code for work, as opposed to a university project they have now forgotten, is about zero. People who can code don’t look for jobs as pricing or insight analysts.

I’ve seen analysts come and go through my bit of The Bank for many years. They learn the party-tricks needed to do the job, and that’s it. The chances of them conceiving of a project that requires two hundred lines of SQL defining a bunch of temporary tables and bringing it all together in a comprehensive SELECT query, for dumping into Tableau, is about zero. Don’t get me wrong, these guys can think through business consequences to some depth. They just ain’t engineers.

I can’t teach the problem-solving bit. That can only be learned by doing, until one has enough experience for all the rules-of-thumb and how-to articles to make sense.

I could be being a bit of a dick about this. Telling myself I’m so damn special that no-one could possibly replace me. That The Bank could hire. There are plenty of people smarter, faster and more effective than me, but they won’t work where I work. Partly because it takes a serious attitude to work amongst a bunch of ambitious, focussed people who want results on their CVs. See, there I go again. I’m so special.

Maybe I suggest that they hire someone with the personality to work in the business, has done coding as part of their day job, and wants to help as much facilitating others as by writing Powerpoints with insights.

In the meantime, I can document all the stuff that needs taking out of my head and putting into print.

I Have My Books and My Music To Protect Me

Okay, I changed the lyric slightly.

That was my song then, and in a different way it’s my song now.

But then again, this was always one of my favourite ever songs.


Because it showed me how I could be feeling. One day. If only.

(Not my photo of the Queensborough Bridge)

Don't Learn to Play Like Someone Else

I’ve been watching some of the 80/20 Drummer recently. It took me a while, because I’m quick like that, to realise that he’s primarily a hip-hop drummer.


He’s interesting and not a techno-flash kit-banger. Oddly, he admires techno-flash kit bangers.


In one of his lessons, he was talking about drumming like Tony Williams.

Whoa.

Nobody can drum like Tony Williams. Tony Williams was playing with Miles Davis when he was seventeen years old. We’re all way older than seventeen already.

Here’s my question: did Tony Williams got that good and original at seventeen by spending hours trying to sound like Elvin Jones? Or learning Philly Jo Jones licks? No. He could probably listen to both the Jones’s and hear what they were doing, but then he went away and did it his way. I’m sure Williams could play a flam triplet as well as any military drummer, but why would he want to, when he could play his version of a flam triplet.

I realised what had been niggling at me while watching a lot of You Tube music videos.

They are all about how to sound like someone else. Or play chord-scale, which makes everyone sound like everyone else.

There’s nothing wrong with learning a couple of Larry Carlton licks, so you can throw them in now and then as a joke: the great jazz saxophone players all did that. There is everything wrong with spending days of hours trying to play like Larry Carlton.

(And no, Steve Vai didn’t spend hours learning to play Frank Zappa guitar solos. He has better ears than you and me: surely he had to work on the really tricky bits, but mostly, I bet he listened and played right off. The old-school jazz world had many musicians who could hear a solo, and play it right back at you.)

What you’re supposed to be doing is learning to play like yourself. Part of that is listening to a lot of music until you hear someone doing something, and you get a direction in an instant as Miles said. Or maybe you just find yourself doing it. Who do you think Stevie Winwood was copying? Nobody. That guitar playing on Medicated Goo is all him. No stories about it being some jazz session guitarist.

What happens if you don’t have a self to play like? That’s the whole point of playing, dummy. So you develop a personality. That’s why jazz fans can listen to five bars of a track they’ve never heard before and rattle off the names of the players. Because back then, everyone developed their own sound. One reason was that the damn jazz degree didn’t beat it out of them. The player’s sound was what we would now call their brand. You want that sound, you hire that man.

But shouldn’t a professional musician be able to read the charts, play in a neutral style, or however the bandleader wants, and vamp the changes behind the soloist? As well as solo as the song, genre and audience require?

You know anyone who’s making a living as a selfless professional musician? Outside a couple of dozen orchestras? Aren’t many of those gigs left now. The people who make money have voices of their own, because their audience wants that voice, because the other members of the band heard ten other guys before this one, who just had the sound they wanted.

Maybe all those You Tube music videos are for nerds who don’t want to think about the responsibility of developing a musical personality. Maybe they think it’s silly, given that they play, like me, hobby guitar and will never play in public, and they just want to sound like one of their heroes for ten bars.

To the contrary, I would say. For those of us with day jobs, spending a lot of time in shut-down mode travelling and dealing with the outside world, that hour or so of hobby guitar may be the only time we get to be ourselves.

Social Media Banning the Right-Wing is Just Business

WTF is it with all the Anti-Semitism and crude racial comments on the American alt- / Far Right? And the European Right for that matter? Then complaining that they get de-platformed, un-monetised, shadow-banned and generally shut down.

Their explanation is to do with conspiracies.

It’s business. Everything is business, especially when they tell you it isn’t.

The alt-Right think that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and You Tube are the media equivalent of a common carrier, which is, to quote Wikipedia:

...distinguished from a contract carrier, which is a carrier that transports goods for only a certain number of clients and that can refuse to transport goods for anyone else... A common carrier holds itself out to provide service to the general public without discrimination... A common carrier must further demonstrate to the [government] that it is "fit, willing, and able" to provide those services for which it is granted authority. Common carriers typically transport persons or goods according to defined and published routes, time schedules, and rate tables upon the approval of regulators. Public airlines, railroads, bus lines, taxicab companies, phone companies, internet service providers, cruise ships, motor carriers (i.e., canal operating companies, trucking companies), and other freight companies generally operate as common carriers.

That is, social media should carry on its website anything any member of the public wishes to put there, provided that the content is not illegal.

However, social media are not common carriers. They are advertising billboards. Not advertisers. Not advertising agencies. Not publishers. Not even printers. You Tube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter: all they do is own the billboards by the roadside. Different billboards for different media types, but still billboards.

The advertiser is the user. The billboards are used by the user, who posts content: look at my small business / product / brand / band / body / fabulous lifestyle / whatever.

Advertising is wasted on men. Men buy via word-of-mouth, reviews, and trial. We simply don’t see most advertisements, and when we do, it’s only to ask ourselves how dumb the agency and client must have been to run the campaign.

Advertising is aimed at women. Women are not gullible, but they are pervious to advertising.

It’s about more than chocolate, shoes, make-up and YOLO holidays. An attractive woman whose looks and upbeat presentation gets her a product sponsorship deal is advertising herself and gets a useful response. A photographer who is hired on the basis of his Instagram portfolio is advertising and getting a useful response. A woman who posts holiday pictures and gets complimentary comments is advertising herself and getting feel-good responses.

Anything that threatens to alienate that female audience gets banned. This is business. Anything that keeps that female audience engaged gets to stay. So a male-run account that gets the right level of OMG fake-outrage from women may actually stay. OMG fake-outrage is a little hormone hit all its own and some people love it.

The alt- and far- Right and their conspiracies and bad language alienate large chunks of the female audience. That’s not allowed: the horses must not be frightened.

The far-Left extremists say extreme and often violent things, but these delight a large chunk of the social media audience. Hence they don’t get banned.

Banning the creepy, foul-mouthed Right wing is just business. Not a socio-political programme or conspiracy.