Today’s article is a little different than usual.
And it’s also probably the most important one that I’ve added so far.
It’s not about an article and what it is about.
It’s about an answer on Quora which (at first glance) has nothing to do with growing your business.
But I’ll explain how it has *everything* to do with it.
So, it’s an answer on Quora about how andy why Keras does exceptionally well in Kaggle competitions.
Ok, I know. It’s neither exciting nor clear. Yet.
First, what is Kaggle? On their homepage, they say they are “The Home of Data Science & Machine Learning.”
It’s a community of data scientists who compete to solve different real-world machine learning problems. Like automatically suggesting product prices to online sellers, or automatically labeling big slabs of matter as either ships or icebergs, based on satellite pictures from space.
Next, what is Keras? It’s a Deep Learning framework which recently seems to win a disproportionate share of the competitions on Kaggle.
Someone on Quora asked for the reason behind it.
Here’s an excerpt from the answer given by the author of Keras:
In machine learning competitions, those who win are rarely those who had the best idea from the start, and simply implemented it, submitted their results and forgot about it.
Developing good models requires iterating many times on your initial ideas, up until the deadline; you can always improve your models further.
Your final models will typically share little in common with the solutions you envisioned when first approaching the problem, because a-priori plans basically never survive confrontation with experimental reality.
So winning is not so much about how good your theoretical vision is, it’s about how much contact with reality your vision has been through.
You don’t lose to people who are smarter than you, you lose to people who have iterated through more experiments than you did, refining their models a little bit each time.
So, so true.
Replace [machine learning competitions] with [business] or [your industry name], and it still stands.
Even Darwin knew that. It wasn’t the strongest who would survive. It was the one who could change and adapt the fastest.
Same with business, growing your revenue, and conversion optimization.
I can’t emphasize it enough so I’ll just repeat it here:
You don’t lose to people who are smarter than you, you lose to people who have iterated through more experiments than you did, refining their models a little bit each time.
If I could, I would print it and post it on every monitor of every business. Or make it a default password to every computer, so that we would have to type it every morning starting our work.
Please always keep that in mind. Always.
Thank you.
