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John Rauser

Lead Data Scientist, Pinterest · 1 appearance on the record.

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

scientistengineerauthor@jrauser ↗LinkedIn ↗

Rauser is known across the tech industry for influential conference talks on statistics and graphical perception, notably Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain and How Humans See Data. Throughout his career, he built data and engineering systems across companies including Farecast, Amazon, Pinterest, and Snap.

7statements → 1claims → 1claims resolved → 4.14/5average certainty → 2.57/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved. 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 John 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
A study shows beer drinkers attract 4.4 more mosquitoes than water drinkers
“To get the, to find that the average person who drank beer attracted 4.4 more mosquitoes than the average water drinker.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 5:51 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

222 words/min while actually speaking · 36.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for John Rauser: only 1 usable question→answer exchange 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: 3,326 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 →

Everything John Rauser said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Pinterest data scientist John Rauser cannot derive the t-distribution from scratch
“There might be five people in this room, the people who raised their hands, who could sit down and just derive this from first principles. I am certainly not among those people, and I am a working data scientist.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 9:21 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Opinion
John Rauser says many software engineers fake their understanding of statistics
“What I want to claim today is that many of you are faking it when it comes to statistics.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 2:02 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
John Rauser: Classical analytical statistics relies on assumptions that are rarely true
“The analytical approach is not better. This is an approximation to a distribution under a model with a whole bunch of assumptions which are rarely true and are almost always ignored anyway.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 12:24 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
John Rauser: Working data scientists must know how to code
“Yeah, I mean, I think, ah, like a working data scientist has to be able to code, because if they can't fish for themselves, right?”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 15:15 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
A study shows beer drinkers attract 4.4 more mosquitoes than water drinkers
“To get the, to find that the average person who drank beer attracted 4.4 more mosquitoes than the average water drinker.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 5:51 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
John Rauser says programming gives developers superpowers for learning statistics
“If you can program a computer You have superpowers when it comes to learning statistics, because being able to program allows you to tinker with the most fundamental ideas in statistics, the way you might have tinkered with electronics when you were a kid, or …”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 13:56 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
Moving from Hive to Amazon Redshift was a game changer for Pinterest
“At Pinterest we use Redshift. We're big users of Amazon's Redshift product. That's been a pretty substantial game changer for us moving away from Hive.”
John Rauser Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 17:33 John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
John Rauser, Pinterest // Big Data at Pinterest // Data Driven NYC (Hosted by FirstMark Ca Oct 16, 2014 16m
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