Jay Cordes

Jay Cordes is a data scientist and co-author of The Phantom Pattern Problem (Oxford 2020) and the award-winning The 9 Pitfalls of Data Science (Oxford, 2019) with Gary Smith. He earned a degree in Mathematics from Pomona College and more recently received a Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) degree from UC Berkeley. Jay hopes to improve the public's ability to distinguish truth from nonsense and to guide future data scientists away from the common pitfalls he saw in the corporate world.

Archives

Steph Curry Got Red Hot and Torched the “Hot Hand Fallacy”

Many statisticians dismiss remarkable streaks like his as the Hot Hand Fallacy. Are they right?
Jay Cordes and Gary Smith
January 4, 2021
Is “Hot Hands” really a fallacy, as some claim? Steph Curry is arguably the greatest shooter in National Basketball Association (NBA) history. In 2020, during practice the day after Christmas, Curry demolished that record by making 105 consecutive 3-point shots.

In Science, We Can’t Just “Settle” for Data Clusters

The board game, Settlers of Catan, offers a clear illustration of what can go wrong when we are duped by data clusters
Gary Smith and Jay Cordes
August 17, 2020
Settlers of Catan is an incredible board game created by Klaus Teuber, a German game designer. It has been translated into dozens of languages and tens of millions of sets have been sold. The basic four-player board consists of 19 hexagons (hexes) representing resources: 3 brick, 4 lumber, 4 wool, 4 grain, 3 ore, and 1 desert. Players acquire and use resources based on dice rolls, card draws, trading, and the location of their settlements and cities. Part of the game’s seductive appeal is that there are many, many ways to arrange the 19 hexagons and successful strategies depend on how the hexagons are arranged. The rules are simple but winning strategies are complex and elusive. The official rules of Catan recommend that the 19 hexes be shuffled, randomly placed face down on the …

Is Chloroquine really a “Game Changer” for COVID-19?

Test it, but don’t bet on it
Jay Cordes and Gary Smith
March 25, 2020

When a field is hot, there is a race to publish. With a large number of researchers trying a wide variety of treatments, it’s almost certain that that someone will find a coincidental pattern that is statistically significant but meaningless. The only solution, alas, is further testing.