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The Numbers Game
We often talk of social statistics, especially those that seem as straightforward as age, as if a bureaucrat were poised with a clipboard, peering through every window, counting; or, better still, had some machine to do it for them. The unsurprising truth is that, for many of the statistics we take for granted, there is… Continue reading
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Researching my health statistics class, and found this great walk-through of the issues of sensitivity and specificity in medical test design and interpretation. Clear, easy to read, and suitable for everyone. Everyone that gets medical tests done or will get medical tests done (which, let’s face it, is everyone) should be familiar with this stuff, but it’s… Continue reading
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I’ve been playing around with cognitive disfluency in slide design for my class lately, trying to solve a conundrum. The problem is this — we know from research that reading materials that introduce “desirable difficulties” (such as presenting information in a difficult to read font) are recalled better than reading materials with a cleaner, more… Continue reading
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From A. N. Whitehead’s An Introduction to Mathematics, a brilliant early reflection on what we now see as a System 1/System 2 problem: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise… Continue reading
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Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! Continue reading
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Keynes, Anti-Semite? Really?
Pardon the intrusion — but I find this interesting. There’s a diary entry of Keynes being circulated around that supposedly proves Keynes was an anti-Semite. This is meant to be a brilliant rebuttal to Paul Krugman’s “Keynes was Right” column on how Keynes’s theoretical model of macroeconomics has been vindicated. In some ways it doesn’t… Continue reading
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Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful thing I’ve read today
Why the I Love Charts post is the most beautiful thing I’ve read today There’s so much to like in this post. It starts with nuanced exploration of feminism, terminology, and privilege, but ends as a reflection of the difficulties of staying a good person on the internet, especially when you run a site. Dealing… Continue reading
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Klout wins for this year’s stupidest bar chart
Check it out here: http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2011/12/22/stupidest-bar-chart-of-2011-congrats-klout/ I’m not sure how you trust a company who claims to have some super-secret statistical insight when they put out things like this. Continue reading
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A Herd Immunity to Nonsense
Mark Pagel on the internet and our cultural evolution: A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal… Continue reading
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Cognitive Bias and Education as a Public Good
A strange but true exhortation from Dan Kahneman, the guy who, with Amos Tversky, basically invented the field of cognitive bias. After forty years of looking into the weird world of bias he says the only effective way to get around your own biases is to create a society of people skilled enough to correct… Continue reading
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