Smuggled Gold and Untrustworthy Intuition — with Leland McInnes
Leland McInnes has spent his career building tools a lot data scientists take for granted (UMAP, HDBSCAN), and amusingly the applications keep getting stranger. On this episode of The Test Set, he tells Michael, Hadley, and Wes about teams tracking laundered gold through mineral impurities, and the time he helped casinos optimize slot machine layouts. Also, why nobody's intuition survives contact with high-dimensional space. On this episode of The Test Set, we hit all that, plus imposter syndrome, AI as a sounding board, and the case for asking better questions instead of chasing answers.
Episode notes
Leland McInnes (UMAP, HDBSCAN) joins Michael, Hadley, and Wes to talk about the weirdest places his tools have ended up, plus why he thinks intuition is basically useless above three dimensions. He also opens up about imposter syndrome and why he'd rather help you ask better questions than hand you an answer.
- Wild UMAP use cases, e.g., catching laundered gold
- Why casinos pay mathematicians to rearrange slot machines
- High-dimensional space and how it defies human intuition
- Neural embeddings for people who aren't AI researchers
- Imposter syndrome — across two disciplines
- Leland’s take on AI as a rubber-duck testing partner
- “Look at your data" because it legit beats guessing
Hosts & guests
