Simple Guide to Complexity Theory
After reading Jeff’s terribly misguided post about NP-completeness I thought to myself: “If Jeff, who seems to be completely clueless about complexity theory, can write a blog post about it then so can...
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Is that possible?
I normally read the good math bad math blog, where Mark Chu-Carroll debunks crackpots that try to hide their crazyness behind bad math. A while ago, he posted an article called “Why Math?“, where he...
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Visualizing Bayes’ theorem
I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way. Of course...
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The Monty Hall problem
After all the positive feedback I got from Visualizing Bayes’ theorem, I thought I’d post my explanation of the Monty Hall problem. I was fascinated for a while with this problem because at first it...
View ArticleThe Two Envelopes Problem
A recent thread in reddit about the two envelopes problem reminded me of how unintuitive probabilities can be. There is a fundamental flaw with how the original post worded the problem: You and I both...
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Probabilities
Introduction For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to write an article explaining briefly what p-values are and what they really measure. Turns out there are enough subtleties involved that I...
View ArticlePigeons Beat Students at Probabilities
Interesting. Pigeons outperform humas at the Monty Hall problem. First the pigeons: Each pigeon was faced with three lit keys, one of which could be pecked for food. At the first peck, all three keys...
View ArticleLucia de Berk
This is infuriating. In June 2004, Lucia was convicted of 7 murders and 3 attempted murders by the Court of Appeal in The Hague. She was given a life sentence; in view of the lack of evidence, a...
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Have you ever wondered whether some books would be better if the author had rewritten them after they were done? I have wondered that about the Harry Potter books. I read the original Harry Potter...
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Mersenne Primes
In 1653, Marin Mersenne, of Mersenne Primes fame, made the bold claim that was a prime number. That claim remained unchallenged for 250 years – no computers back then – until… …in 1903, Frank Nelson...
View ArticleBayes’ Theorem Using Trimmed Trees
A reader sent me the link to the following video: I think it does a great job of walking you through multiple applications of Bayes’ theorem. I find it easier to use the equations, but we all learn in...
View ArticleWhy I don’t trust rankings
From a recent article on Slate about how U.S. News ranks universities: U.S. News changed the scores last year because a new team of editors and statisticians decided that the books had been cooked to...
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