Michael Jordan

Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicscientistfounderauthorpeople.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan ↗Wikipedia ↗

Michael I. Jordan is a professor at UC Berkeley who pioneered seminal work in probabilistic graphical models, variational methods, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. He co-founded the distributed computing startup Anyscale and focuses on the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and economics.

9statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 4.22/5average certainty → 2.22/5average debate potential → 24said about them ↓

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 3 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Jordan notes core statistical decision theory ignores computational runtime

“If you look at core statistical theory, it's statistical decision theory, I teach it all the time, you never see the word run time.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 5:42 Michael Jordan

How they sound: speaking style how? →

287 words/min while actually speaking · 19.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Michael Jordan: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 5,025 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said9 What others said24 Episodes1

Everything Michael Jordan said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Jordan predicts principled personalized big data systems remain decades away

“So I think we're decades away from being able to do what this boss is asking us to do in some principle way. You can occasionally build a one-off system that does some of these things, but we're decades from having the real principles.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 4:51 Michael Jordan

Insight

Jordan says tech industry builds software without addressing underlying statistical issues

“We're building lots of software, hoping it works, and we're not really thinking about the harder intellectual issues at play.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 2:11 Michael Jordan

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Jordan says personalization business models fail due to statistical limits

“A lot of these business models are failing. People actually can't personalize very well, and it's Because of statistical issues. You've got huge amounts of data about some people, and very little about lots of people, and you don't know how to transfer the sta…”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 2:53 Michael Jordan

Insight

Jordan warns high-dimensional Bayesian inference is overly sensitive to unknown priors

“And a lot of times you have no idea what the prior should be. You don't know what the tails should be in particular. And you're in high dimensions, you really have no idea how the tail behavior should be. And the whole inference is highly sensitive to the tail…”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 13:13 Michael Jordan

Assertion Supported

Jordan notes core statistical decision theory ignores computational runtime

“If you look at core statistical theory, it's statistical decision theory, I teach it all the time, you never see the word run time.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 5:42 Michael Jordan

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Jordan argues differential privacy is rarely analyzed for statistical inference

“Differential privacy has mostly not been thought about inferentially”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 7:12 Michael Jordan

Insight

Jordan argues meaningful real-world decisions require statistical error bars

“And real life decisions that mean something, you need error bars. If they don't mean anything, you're just trying to serve customers and hope that everybody comes to your website, you know, I don't know, who cares? But in real life, you need error bars.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 14:33 Michael Jordan

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Jordan explains traditional statistical bootstrap fails to scale on terabyte datasets

“Okay, but, gotcha, big gotcha, which is you can't do this on a terabyte of data, alright, because each resampling of the original data set on, if you have a terabyte, it's about 632 gigabytes. So you're sitting there on your terabyte of data at a central compu…”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 18:35 Michael Jordan

Assertion Partly supported

Jordan claims Bag of Little Bootstraps vastly outperforms traditional bootstrap

“Here's the new algorithm, you know, again, implement on Spark. It's that little red box there. It took about a couple hundred seconds to get it, And the answer quality is better than the bootstrap after 15,000 seconds.”

Michael Jordan Jul 28, 2017 ▶ 21:36 Michael Jordan

The other half of the tape: Michael Jordan's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 23 times in 10 episodes on the a16z Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Gavin Baker 6 Ben Horowitz 5 Andre Iguodala 3 Que Gaskins 2 Chris Lyons 2 Sriram Krishnan 1 Raghu Raghuram 1 Jeff Woo 1

Statements about Michael Jordan, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported

Michael Jordan's Nike shoe line generates $2 billion in annual sales

“You know I mean, you may get lucky, like Michael Jordan, to have your own shoe line with Nike, which turns into, you know two billion per year in sales, but that's just one guy.”

Andre Iguodala Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:33 a16z Podcast | Andre Iguodala Knows Tech -- And Why the Warriors Won't Be Stopped