Greetings everyone,
This week’s newsletter at a glance:
Learning in Public
How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Newsletter
Interim Analysis Approaches — Alpha Spending
Enjoy!
Rereading can lead to a more complex, more literary, understanding of a text, when the stress is no longer on the what, but on the how, namely the craft of the composition and the quality of the language.
—Victor Brombert (1923-)
✏️ Learning in Public
Learning is often a process of building through making mistakes. Making mistakes in public is difficult to do — human nature gets the better of us. We hate to show our deficiencies to the world: we’d much rather share our successes, our strengths, and our advantages than the side of us that makes us feel lesser than thou.
There is strength in learning in public. For one, doing work in public is a form of accountability — if you know the world will see it, you have to be comfortable taking ownership of the outcome. You’ll try that little bit harder to ensure that you don’t end up in a situation where you did less than your best work and people judge you for it. But more importantly, learning, and failing, in public is inspiring. It’s inspiring because it’s unavoidable: all great things are built on a graveyard of failures. It’s encouraging to know that we are not alone on the road to improvement. Failure is a necessary part of the process. And one that should not be hidden from the world, but presented for what it is and what it represents: it represents the willingness to try, the desire to do more and be more. Learning in public is an accelerator for you and those around you.
veni, vidi, vici
I came, I saw, I conquered
💡 Food for Thought
Love yourself, forgive yourself, and cut yourself slack when needed.
🔗 Sunday Best
How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Newsletter | Tyler Denk, Beehiiv
Beehiiv founder, Tyler Denk and Bryan Elliott sit down to talk about how to build a multi-million dollar newsletter in this episode of Behind the Brand.
Interim analysis: the alpha spending function approach
Citation: DeMets, D L, and K K Lan. “Interim analysis: the alpha spending function approach.” Statistics in medicine vol. 13,13-14 (1994): 1341-52; discussion 1353-6.
Interim analysis of accumulating data in a clinical trial is now an established practice for ethical and scientific reasons. Repeatedly testing interim data can inflate false positive error rates if not handled appropriately. Group sequential methods are a commonly used frequentist approach to control this error rate. Motivated by experience of clinical trials, the alpha spending function is one way to implement group sequential boundaries that control the type I error rate while allowing flexibility in how many interim analyses are to be conducted and at what times. In this paper, we review the alpha spending function approach, and detail its applicability to a variety of commonly used statistical procedures, including survival and longitudinal methods.
To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Thanks for reading!
See you next week.
AT