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igonvalue

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davidbessis.substack.com 11h ago

A theory of the origins of cognitive inequality

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2pts0
www.nytimes.com 5d ago

A Mathematical Tribute to the Soccer Ball

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www.nytimes.com 6d ago

Someone Used AI to Write an Unauthorized Biography of Me

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tim.blog 1mo ago

Has AI Killed How-To Nonfiction?

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www.nytimes.com 2mo ago

EPA to End Some Limits on 'Forever Chemicals' in Drinking Water

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www.nytimes.com 2mo ago

The Last Moments of Jeju Air Flight 2216

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www.nytimes.com 4mo ago

Paul R. Ehrlich, Who Alarmed the World with 'The Population Bomb,' Dies at 93

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www.nytimes.com 4mo ago

His Harvard Lab Was Thriving. Then Came the Cuts

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www.wsj.com 4mo ago

The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE

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www.nytimes.com 5mo ago

Three Olympic Athletes Were Just Disqualified for a Novel Reason: PFAS

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www.bbc.com 1y ago

The goats fighting fires in Los Angeles

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www.newyorker.com 1y ago

Russia's Espionage War in the Arctic

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www.nytimes.com 2y ago

EPA Says 'Forever Chemicals' Must Be Removed from Tap Water

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www.sfchronicle.com 3y ago

This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers

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www.nytimes.com 4y ago

The casualties at the other end of the remote-controlled kill

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www.npr.org 4y ago

A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

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www.nytimes.com 5y ago

The Unlikely Survival of the 1,081 Year-Old Redwood El Palo Alto

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www.wsj.com 5y ago

Pandemic Made Kids' Eyesight Worse

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www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Alan Canfora, Who Carried Wounds from Kent State, Dies at 71

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www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Law Firms Pay Supreme Court Clerks $400k Bonuses. What Are They Buying?

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www.latimes.com 6y ago

The true story of the heartthrob prince of Qatar and his time at USC

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www.nytimes.com 6y ago

As Neo-Nazis Seed Military Ranks, Germany Confronts ‘An Enemy Within’

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www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Flushing the Toilet May Fling Coronavirus Aerosols All Over

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www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Relics of one of volcanology’s more quixotic disaster response plans

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www.nytimes.com 6y ago

Secret Passage Dating to 1660 Is Found Inside U.K. Parliament

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www.nytimes.com 7y ago

For the Spelling Bee, 472k Words May Not Be Enough

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www.nytimes.com 7y ago

The British-Irish Dialect Quiz

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www.propublica.org 8y ago

How the EPA and the Pentagon Downplayed a Growing Toxic Threat

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www.theverge.com 8y ago

YouTube recruiter sues Google for allegedly refusing to hire white and Asian men

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boingboing.net 8y ago

Tesla's demon-haunted cars in Irma's path get a temporary battery-life boost

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3pts1

Spoiler alert.

Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it.

But Sale had read it—and rejected it.

“I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.”

Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short. Sale says he is seeking some sort of appellate relief, if only by public opinion, when in fact the rules included no such reconsideration. Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,” he says.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sale fellow sounds like an asshole.

We document that a portfolio that mimics the purchases of U.S. Senators beats the market by 85 basis points per month, while a port- folio that mimics the sales of Senators lags the market by 12 basis points per month. The large difference in the returns of stocks bought and sold (nearly one percentage point per month) is economically large and reliably positive.

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/gov2126/files/ziobrows...

Salary Negotiation 10 years ago

Patrick, it seems like this latest episode isn't available on iTunes. Maybe it's related to the error message I see when I load the feed in my browser [0]

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 3559 at column 476: Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xE3 0x81 0xA8 0xE3

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed/

The clickbait article headline is "Why Doesn’t Silicon Valley Hire Black Coders?"

The answer is buried three quarters of the way into the article:

When they started interviewing seniors, companies found — as Pratt did at Howard — that many were underprepared. They hadn’t been exposed to programming before college and had gaps in their college classes.

So why isn't the article titled, "Why Aren't Enough Black Coders Prepared for Silicon Valley"?

What would actually happen in the pictured Dark Knight scenario where a relatively small part of the middle of the the bridge disappears? It seems like if the road deck is sufficiently rigid the vertical suspenders near the middle would realign and provide at least some of the tension force previously supplied by the removed suspension cable. Is there any reason why the bridge must fall?

Assuming that the distributions are exactly equal, the test would still give misleading results in situations in which the bias does not manifest as a different cutoff.

For example, if a VC funds all male founders but flips a coin to decide whether to fund each female founder, the test would fail to detect overwhelming bias.

Obviously that specific scenario is not realistic, but I believe something like this is plausible enough: A VC funds all male founders who are considered promising, and all female founders who are considered promising AND went to school with one of the partners.

And it's not hard to imagine a plausible scenario in which the test would give false positives rather than false negatives.

A beta prior is equivalent to assigning “pretend votes” to each new item. Instead of starting out with 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes, we start out with a upvotes and b downvotes. If we expect that most items are bad, we could start with 3 upvotes and 10 downvotes. After getting u real upvotes, and d real downvotes the posterior distribution is Beta(a+u, b+d).

Fascinating. Does this follow as a straightforward consequence of how the beta distribution is defined? Otherwise, is there a proof that someone could point me toward?

The popularity of an item has a Beta(a,b) prior

Is there an optimal choice of a, b given, say, a specific utility function?

Commodities without an alternative (e.g. water) and natural monopolies (e.g. networks) should be owned by the public.

Why do you think there's a water shortage in California right now?

It's a funny article, but I was actually disappointed that the sincere question of how to "moneyball" college admissions was not explored. I don't think there exists much evidence that college admissions officers at places like Harvard add much value beyond merely sorting students by grades and test scores (which themselves are highly predictive of future performance). My suspicion is that admissions officers have about as much predictive acumen as active fund managers (i.e., not very much), but I would be interested to see this tested empirically.