PIVOT
We’re twenty dollars in the hole. Investors are circling, trying to force a sale. We have to make a move.
I remember it like it was last weekend… eating a massive Crumbl cookie in a suburban Chicago parking lot…
Steven Klepper, an economist, studied how industries evolve. One of the most robust results is: first, there are many entrants, and then there is a shakeout period during which the less productive firms get killed off by market forces.
This paper is a good starting point, but if you’re a young economist in Industrial Organization, his bibliography on industry evolution is must-read stuff. The summarizing empirical regularities bent of the field is still sort of out-of-fashion, but it’s the way to answer big questions…
Klepper writes about the evolution of the tire, automobile, television, and penicillin industries, but the internet moves through the stages of the industry lifecycle much faster. Good Enough Statistics, a week old, is part of the first shakeout round after a market was abandoned by its natural monopolist (Towards Data Science). There’s a really clean model here of why the market structure is the way it is…
But the point is: there’s not much reason to submit to G.E.S. for general data science blog posts given the entrance of Data Science Collective and the publication having more than 832,000 followers compared to our 43 (intelligent, brilliant, funny) followers.
Good Enough Statistics does have two significant advantages:
A much better name.
A lime green, brat-inspired logo (brat, as a design language, in the formal register, with upper-case letters and a slight brightening relative to Ms. XCX’s work).
Still, the nearly 20,000x followers make DSC a more attractive place to submit for the would-be poster.
So, instead of making G.E.S. a general publication, I’ll stop soliciting general submissions and make it more of a blog/zine model that has three pillars:
Tightly-curated posts of neat statistics methods/approaches for industry.
Academics writing blog post versions of their research (perhaps with a little editing help from yours truly). I’ll do outbound requests for these and accept submissions at goodenoughstatistics@gmail.com.
Interviews with folks in Data Science and/or Economics.
If you’d like to be an interview subject, email goodenoughstatistics@gmail.com (with a little about yourself/career so I can come up with good questions). I’ll send you a list of questions and then a list of follow-ups. Cobble it into a coherent transcript. “Lightly edit.” Profit.
If we need to PIVOT again, Good Enough Statistics is the perfect name for a consulting LLC or the secretive holding company behind any future crypto scams I want to run. The future and its possibilities are truly limitless.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn
All posts: https://zachlog.com
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