Fallacy

The RBI's recent actions have generated a wave of passionate responses from the Indian fintech community. Through this open letter, I hope to share my personal observations and opinions on some of the challenges related to the fintech landscape in India and the role of the RBI. I have always held the position that RBI is one of the strongest regulators globally and is pro-consumer and anti-risk and not anti-startup. India boasts a very stable banking ecosystem and has seen far fewer bank failures when compared to some of…

Click-through rate (CTR) is a cornerstone metric of PPC marketing.  Calculated as the percentage of people who click on an ad after seeing it, CTR is often treated as a key performance indicator (KPI), commanding disproportionate attention and optimization efforts.Google search interest in the topic of CTR far exceeds that of conversion rate (CVR), even though conversions more directly align with the health and success of a business. This hyperfocus on CTR largely stems from outdated reasoning that deserves…

Have you ever encountered a subpar hotel breakfast while on holiday? You don't really like the food choices on offer, but since you already paid for the meal as part of your booking, you force yourself to eat something anyway rather than go down the road to a cafe. Economists and social scientists argue that such behavior can happen due to the "sunk cost fallacy"—an inability to ignore costs that have already been…

Early in Paul Auster’s latest novel, Baumgartner, his eponymous lead character is speaking to a grief counsellor in the immediate aftermath of losing his wife in a freakishly violent swimming accident. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” he tells her. “You know that, I know that, everyone knows that – and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”When we meet Sy Baumgartner, it is 10 years after Anna’s death. Now 70 and a retired Princeton philosophy professor, we find him enduring a darkly comedic…

For data scientists and analysts in businessPhoto by Tingey Injury Law Firm on UnsplashThere is only a one in a million chance that the accused would match the DNA found at the crime scene. So the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Sound ok? It isn’t!Based on this evidence alone, the accused may have a good chance of being innocent and this is the logical trap described by the unintuitive but wonderfully illuminating Prosecutor’s Fallacy.When we understand this, we start to see it everywhere in advertising, the…