Page: Data-driven success formulas fail when adopted at scale
Scott Page · #55 Scott Page: Becoming a Model Thinker · Apr 2, 2019 · at 27:36
Complex systems professor Scott Page discusses Albert-László Barabási's book 'The Formula' and the aggregation paradoxes that occur in social feedback loops.
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“And in this book, The Formula, he talks about how these are the lessons for success by looking at tons and tons of data. And it's in some of it is about some of the things we were talking about before with Gawande's. You want to like make sure you use your network really well. You want to seize opportunities, those sorts of things, but there's a circular reasoning in there that in the sense of everybody followed that formula, it's not clear that everybody would be successful. Right. And so the thing is oftentimes these systems can contain feedbacks within them, right. That make them logically inconsistent at the level of the whole.”
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