June 2012
Intermediate to advanced
226 pages
5h 5m
English
Content preview from Web Performance Daybook Volume 2Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 24. Why You’re Probably Reading Your Performance Measurement Results Wrong (At Least You’re in Good Company)
One of my favorite books of 2011 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In his book, Kahneman identifies the two systems of thought that are constantly warring inside our heads:
System 1, which is fast and intuitive
System 2, which is slow and logical
Almost invariably, System 1 is flawed, yet we helplessly rely on it. We also have a painful tendency to think we’re applying System 2 to our thinking, when in fact it’s just an intellectually tarted up version of System 1.
Kahneman offers a nifty little test of this thinking:
A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital about 45 babies are born each day, and in the smaller hospital about 15 babies are born each day. As you know, about 50% of all babies are boys. However the exact percentage varies from day to day. Sometimes it may be higher than 50%, sometimes lower. For a period of 1 year, each hospital recorded the days on which more than 60% of the babies born were boys. Which hospital do you think recorded more such days?
The larger hospital
The smaller hospital
About the same (that is, within 5% of each other)
The correct answer is B, the smaller hospital. But as Kahneman notes, “When this question was posed to a number of undergraduate students, 22% said A; 22% said B; and 56% said C. Sampling theory entails that the expected number of days on ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.