The Goldilocks Principle of AI: Why Sometimes Good Enough Is Better Than Perfect
One of my students analyzed thousands of mental health posts. What drives engagement surprised us both. The student applied computational text analysis to examine emotional vulnerability patterns across anonymous discussions. They built sentiment models to understand how people share and respond. The key finding: engagement was driven by interpersonal interaction,
Students shouldn't build production systems. A student in my class just proved me wrong. One of my grad students benchmarked five large language models for structured data extraction from ClinicalTrials.gov. This wasn't a toy project. Clinical trial evidence synthesis drives treatment decisions for millions of