EconTech

There will soon be another post on the role of theory in advancing knowledge. For the time being, Robin Hanson channels my favorite intellectual of the 20th century, von Neumann:
Keeping Math Real

John von Neumann:
As a mathematical discipline travels far from its empirical source, or still more, if it is a second and third generation only [...]

In econometrics and stats, I got it. I still understand it the way I understood it. Apparently, that is the problem. As Gelman has noted in the past, the difference between a statistically significant and statistically insignificant result is statistically insignificant (usually?). So the more modern notion of what p-values rather escapes me. I have [...]

I have been occasionally accused (several times as of late) of not changing my mind. I started writing this post (as indicated by the question mark in the title) disagreeing with Gelman’s characterization of polarization as solely a property of a distribution, and not the variable. I had started to talk about outliers, extremes, etc. [...]

and, specifically, counting. UGH. It is incredibly counterintuitive, and what seems obvious just simply isn’t the case. This is yet another case of “run the numbers, stupid.” And if you don’t know how, stop forming your opinion, right now. You have no hope of getting a good estimate.
 Probability Intuition:
Last quarter I taught discrete math. One [...]

Comment:
topology videos are, apparently, the shit
Watch a sphere get turned inside out with no cuts or creases. Hat tip: John Baez.
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I tried to think of a witty, ironic title for this post, but in the end, I simply couldn’t. The above title is a literal statement of fact.
A reader named Warren Smith informs me of an Australian TV commercial (which you can watch on YouTube), in which two fashion models have the following conversation:
Model [...]
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At Rigorous Trivialities, a relatively new math weblog, there is a post that is an early contender for the title of Most Important Blog Post of All Time. It’s a sketch of a rigorous proof that parallel parking is always possible (assuming the space is longer than your car). So if you can’t [...]
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Economists have a certain way of looking at the world, in which (to simplify quite a bit) people act rationally to maximize their utility. That sort of talk pushes physicists’ buttons, because maximizing functions is something we do all the time. I’m not deeply familiar with economics in any sense; everything I know about the [...]

There is a discussion at the Everything Seminar about everyone’s favorite topic, the axiom of choice. The axiom of choice has various pathological consequences, such as the Banach-Tarski paradox and the existence of a non-Lebesgue-measurable set. The problem, everyone notes, is that by its very nature constructions that depend on the axiom of [...]
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While I rummage around the brain for something more controversial to blog (that’s nevertheless not too controversial), here, for your reading pleasure, is a talk I gave a couple weeks ago at Google Cambridge. Hardcore Shtetl-Optimized fans will find little here to surprise them, but for new or occasional readers, this is about the [...]
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