

Peter Norvig on Being Wrong - plinkplonk
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/03/error-message-google-research-director-peter-norvig-on-being-wrong.aspx

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demallien
The thing I found most interesting about this interview is just how badly
Peter Norvig has failed to understand what Facebook is all about - I don't use
Facebook so that friends can give me recommendations about what camera to buy
- I use Facebook because knowing what my friend Sally got up to this weekend
is far more interesting to me than what Britney Spears has been up to. I
_might_ be interesting in knowing what camera she used to take that brilliant
photo of Jim under the fireworks, but that's about as close as it gets.

This has a huge implication for the value of Facebook - they know who I am,
really. They know where I live, my age, my sex, and they can even tell what
sort of activities I like. Google tries to guess this information from my page
view habits, but they often get it wrong, big time. Here's an example - if I
get a dating site ad on Facebook it correctly identifies me as a woman and
throws up pictures of guys. If that ad is being served up by Google, I get
identified as a man because of all the time I spend on tech sites, so the same
ad has pictures of women in it. Facebook gives me ads about clothes, Google
almost never does. I suspect that Google's core business is at significant
risk here. People are spending more and more time in the Facebook universe,
those 'Like' buttons have popped up all over the Web, and that spells trouble
for Google. It'll be interesting to see how they respond, but I for one won't
be buying any more stock in Google for a while.

~~~
jakevoytko
I think Norvig looks at Facebook as a lost opportunity for data mining:
Facebook isn't used as a recommendation engine any more than Google is used as
an ad company, yet all user actions always gets piped back to ad results. If
John is friends with Sally (who is kind of cute, and kind of a photography
geek, and recently bought a good midrange point-and-shoot), John
subconsciously wants that brand to show up somewhere in the recommendations,
even if it is too expensive. But Google doesn't know that John's friends have
bought that camera, because who posts what camera they bought on their Google
profile? If Facebook has the ad instead of Google, then Facebook might get the
all-important click.

~~~
msg
That is right. Norvig doesn't see what Facebook is good at and ask how it will
make money. He turns the question on its head, looks to a successful business
model and asks how Facebook could be used for it. And it is an uphill battle
for Facebook to monetize in this fashion.

I think what we've seen so far is that Facebook is about creating social
spaces, not solving problems, so it really can't be used that effectively as a
recommendation engine. Facebook doesn't have a great way to seek rent on these
social spaces because they've built their user base on free service. So where
is the money going to come from? Probably selling user data to corporations.

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houseabsolute
Googlers are fine with admitting the small errors. I had a bug, this design
isn't so great, the evals show this change to be a big loss. Those are the
easy ones to admit. The big errors -- this product sucks, this idea is bad,
eighty percent of the support personell on this piece of infrastructure are
uncooperative jerks -- come less easily.

Anyway, eng doesn't really run Google any more. PM does. Eng can still push
back to some extent and feels important when they control huge budgets for new
datacenters. But who designs, specifies and ultimately controls the products
for which those datacenters are being allocated? Most everything you see, good
or bad, that happens on Google these days came from a PM.

~~~
ntoshev
What justifies a product management role separate from the developers? A PM
that is also a developer understands better what is the cost of all these
features.

Maybe a separate PM would see the forest better as he is not looking at
specific trees, but there are a lot of people who can do both well.

~~~
spydez
Don't know about Google. I'm working for a defense contractor, so we may have
more hoops and red tape to blunder through... but my PMs are always busy
talking to the customer, writing documentation, figuring out what the specs
actually mean, managing, or something. There's no time left in the day to
hunker down with the code (or digital logic or whatever engineering discipline
the PM came from).

See also "Maker's Schedule Manager's Schedule":
<http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

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yarapavan
Like this:

And, like you say, it does create a very different attitude toward error. If
you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an
engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do
experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough
information out of those experiments. _You want your experiment to be like the
flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You
want to not know what the results are going to be._

~~~
houseabsolute
That's idealism talking, but practically speaking experimenters are invested
in the outcomes of all but the least interesting experiments. Nobody wants the
search feature they spent a month implementing to come back with negative
results on evaluation. This is not only true at Google.

Some of the stuff in this sounds nice but I feel it lacks some honesty. "What
is the thing you have been the most wrong about?" And you say that the worst
error in judgment you've made is an off-hand remark in a meeting? Let's be
serious here.

His call on big mistakes from Google seems good but I doubt Google could have
executed on it even if they had known how big Facebook would be beforehand.
Big G is not a product company and is best at making products that minimize
the time you have to spend using them.

~~~
plinkplonk
"Some of the stuff in this sounds nice but I feel it lacks some honesty. "What
is the thing you have been the most wrong about?" And you say that the worst
error in judgment you've made is an off-hand remark in a meeting?"

Huh? That isn't how I read it at all. From the article:

"Question: What about you yourself—what have you personally been most wrong
about?

Answer: One thing is how fast things change.[Stuff about meeting here]You
think you have this experience—and we talked about how important experience is
for having intuitions—but experience can go out of date very quickly."

To me he seems to be saying that one of his major mistakes is underestimating
how fast things change, and underestimating the erosion of the value of his
experience in guiding his intuition (He just finished talking about the
importance of intuition for situations where statistics and data can't
help/don't exist.)

Given that he was speaking about a professional context [1] and the position
he occupies at Google (Director of Research), where anticipating change would
be presumably part of his job description, that sounded to me like admission
of a major lapse, somewhat different from "My biggest mistake was an off hand
remark I made at a meeting", as you seemed to imply.

He was using the meeting incident as a concrete example of a rather large
failing. How is it "dishonest"?

[1] The whole interview is about errors in a professional context , about
Google and his work there, so I wouldn't expect to hear about whether he got
stoned as a teenager and got thrown in jail! ;-)

~~~
ntoshev
I think it was more of a regret that his intuition about the problem area gets
invalidated so quickly. The top technical guys are supposed to have good
intuitions about what works and what doesn't; this is a major part of the
value they can add. So I take this as a very serious self-criticism.

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cake
Reminds me of a blog post from J. Fried :
[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-failure-
is...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1555-learning-from-failure-is-overrated)

I couldn't disagree more with what Fried has to say, which surprised me
because it doesn't happen very often, this interview expresses why quite good.

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protomyth
Does it seem like some people would really like to be a social network created
by Visa?

