Algebra-shmalgebra

If you have a fever, throw away the thermometer. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Edit: Here is the best rebuke of this ridiculous op-ed that I've found.

You didn't earn that

There are a lot of Nobel Prize winning Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve won the Nobel Prize, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.  (Applause.)

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.  There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.  Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American education system that we have that allowed you to thrive.  Somebody invested in high schools and universities.  If you’ve got the Nobel Prize-- you didn’t earn that.  Somebody else made that happen.  All these physics labs didn’t build themselves.  Government research created those labs so that all the scientists could use them to do their research.

Warum hast du Angst vor mir?

I was taking my three-year-old Polish Lowland Sheepdog for a night walk. There was a middle-aged woman walking our way on the sidewalk; she was pushing a shopping cart filled with plastic bags filled with stuff. When she was passing me, my dog got really nervous. She's naturally wary of all strangers, and did not like the woman at all; she moved across the sidewalk to be as far away from the woman as possible. Seeing which, the woman said, 'Why are you afraid of me?' Only, she said it in German. (The translation is this post's title, in case you were wondering.) Which for some reason totally floored me. Only in New York, I thought quite nonsensically.

When I relayed the incident to my wife, she said, 'Well, she is a Polish sheepdog after all, so no wonder she's afraid of Germans.'

Gimme 30

George Dvorsky writes:

Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Executive, claims that his IQ was raised 30 points by taking creatine and going through Dual N-Back training exercises.

This is one of my smaller pet peeves: talking about IQ scores as though the scale was linear. Increasing IQ from 100 to 130 means an increase from 1 in 2 to 1 in 44, whereas increasing it from 130 to 160 means a jump from 1 in 44 to 1 in 32,000. Another 30 points and you're 1 in a million.

For any belief there's a quote supporting it

A hipster clothing store in the East Village posted a chalk-board sign outside their door with a quote from Hemingway: "In order to write about life, you must live it first!" Or something to that effect.

I guess neither Hemingway nor the staff of the hipster clothing store in the East Village have ever heard of Marcel Proust. You know, the guy who is a direct counter-example to the above quote.

On the necessary existence of the elephant in the room

There is a philosophical view which says that mathematics is a way of evolutionary signaling, i.e. an elaborate way of demonstrating fitness (in this case, intelligence) to one's potential mates. This may very well be true but there is an elephant in the room that it does not address. Which is: while the purpose of doing mathematics may be an accident of evolution, its content cannot. It is possible to conceive of a world in which this function of doing mathematics is not plausible, or even a world in which natural selection does not exist at all; however, it is not possible to conceive of a world in which theorems of mathematics are false. Provable propositions are true in every possible world. Inasmuch as mathematics contains theorems about certain modes of reasoning, it follows that there is a realm of human thinking which cannot be an accident of evolution.

How come it's not correcting itself?

Sam Wang writes about the deficiencies of Intrade prediction market:

Even when lots of data are available, such as political polls,  InTrade can still fail. One simple reason is bias: InTrade bettors appear to skew Republican. This could explain why there is such a mismatch between the poll-based Obama win probability (>99% for an election today, probably >80% in November) and the InTrade price (equivalent to a probability of about 0.56). This could be excused on the grounds that the election is far off, and there is uncertainty as to what will happen in the next 4 months. However, there is a third flaw. As I’ve written before, InTrade bettors are habitually underconfident in the face of polling data, even on the eve of an election. Even a 10-point lead in a race is insufficient to drive a market-based probability estimate above 80%. This is perplexing since such a lead is basically a sure thing.

A functional market should be self-correcting. Any systematic bias such as underconfidence or leaning Republican creates an arbitrage opportunity which should be expected to draw new bettors until the point when prices adjust and bias disappears. The question is why this isn't happening in this case.

Your subconscious can only use call-by-value semantics

It's completely incapable of calling by reference. That amazing trick falls squarely within the domain of explicitly conscious reasoning. The subconscious is only able to deal with things directly and does not make the distinction between use and mention. This leads to some very specific bugs, such as the inability to correctly evaluate conditionals. For example, if proposition p is false, the subconscious will erroneously conclude that the implication p -> q must be false as well. Actually, it's worse than that; since the subconscious is incapable of reasoning about propositions without believing that they are true, it will refuse to even parse the conditional and just return a syntax error message.

It's official now: Everything is related

I just finished watching the British movie trilogy Red Riding. In the first part there's a scene where a young journalist who's prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere, while talking to his buddy in a bar, says 'Everything is related; show me just two things that aren't related.' His friend replies, 'City and the fucking championship.'

Is the US under-insured?

Numbers below are 2008-2011 averages in 28 OECD countries as per World Development Indicators.

It's good for you, in that it will make you immortal

This article is a great example of how dumb science reporting can get. A quote:

Coffee-drinking men cut their risk for death by 12 percent after four to five cups of java, according to the study, which was led by the National Institutes of Health's Neal Freedman.

So if I drink 42 cups, I'll cut my risk for death to 0%. Sounds like a good deal to me. Studies such as this one usually define "risk of X" as "risk that X occurs during the duration of the study," which would make the claim that coffee reduces the risk of dying by whatever percent make a lot more sense. But the moron who chose to summarize the study didn't think details like that were important. Next quote:

The report sparked some confusion, too, as coffee drinkers were also puzzlingly more -- yes, more -- likely to die. The reason? Coffee drinkers are also generally smokers. How can coffee drinkers can be both more and less likely to die seems like an arithmetic mystery -- but cut out smoking altogether, and the correlation between coffee and longer lives still stands.

Sure, if you're a dimwit, this could indeed "spark some confusion." So the fact that drinking coffee reduces the risk of death when controlling for smoking, but is correlated with higher risk of death when smoking is not controlled for, "seems like an arithmetic mystery" to you. And you write about science.