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Showing posts with the label Jeff Bezos

Amazon's A-B Testing and Government Applications

One of the benefits of scientific research is that by being empirical or experimentally driven it avoids circular and endless discussions on what works or should work. You can just check it. You test to see what works. Jeff Bezos described in a Stanford lecture how Amazon utilizes this testing in it's site live to verify improvements. The ability to test which option is best increases efficiency as it cuts down not only on inefficient options but also on the time that would have been spent discussing the pros and cons of each approach. At Amazon this approach is called A-B testing. Where one option "A" is tested against option "B" and the results are seen immediately. This data-driven approach is what makes science edge out over other disciplines, and it's one that seems sorely lacking on the social sciences, where argument rather than data still reigns king. It doesn't matter that "trickle down economics" didn't have it's intended effe...