robbymeals / street-signs

Avoiding the Lexical Hazards on The Road to Knowledge

Street Signs:

Avoiding the Lexical Hazards on the Journey
to Machine Learning Knowledge

TOC

• Introduction
• 1: Dead Ends and Winding Detours
• 2: Hectic Intersections and High Speed Merges
• 3: Falling Rocks

FAQ

What is this thing?

An attempt at cataloguing and explaining or dismissing as many of the most horrible and damaging examples of confusing or ambiguous terminology employed in any or all of the disciplines and professions working in or making contributions to statistics and machine learning. All shoehorned gracelessly into a single bloated metaphor.

Who is it for?

Teachers and learners generally, people moving from one intellectual silo to another, fans of miscellaneous trivia about dead statisticians and Beyonce.

I have an example you don't have yet.

Sweet! This is the reason I am writing this thing on github. Please don't keep your light under a bushel. You are a seeker of truth and clarity and you should seize this moment and do one of the following:

1. Fork this repo, add your example as either a "stub" or a complete draft of your example, and open a pull request.
2. Open an issue in this repo providing details on your example, preferably with supporting links if possible.

You are a true hero, and I will buy you a beverage of some kind at some point if that possibility arises in the future.

I found a small error, such as a misspelling or sentence fragment.

Awesome. There are probably many of them and I have debilitating attention deficit disorder. Please do one of the following:

1. Fork this repo! Correct it! Open a pull request!
2. Open an issue pointing to the error.

Thanks. You also will get a beverage of some kind if such a thing is ever in my power to accomplish.

You are wrong about a big thing.

Yep, you are probably right. I am writing this based on my own experiences and the experiences of some people that I have helped learn some stuff. Lots of room for error there. So please do one or more of the following:

1. Fork this repo, rewrite offending example entirely so it's correct, and open a pull request to include your correctly written example.
2. Open an issue in this repo explaining why you think I'm wrong, preferably with supporting links if you have them.
3. Call me names on Twitter or LinkedIn. (Not Facebook. My grandma is on Facebook, you monster.)
4. Talk about about how dumb I am with your coworkers, friends and family.
5. Seethe quietly in a room by yourself. With the lights off.
6. Shower angrily.