What looks like a question about one probability is often, on inspection, a question about a different one entirely. The confusion between P(A|B) and P(B|A) is not just a classroom error — it is a recurring feature of how policy arguments get made, how statistics get reported, and how institutions justify their own behavior. Posts here are about what happens when you flip the conditional and look at what’s actually being claimed.
It’s been almost ten years since I’ve written here. The last time I posted, Donald Trump had just clinched the GOP nomination, his Banzhaf power index had hit 1.0, and I was calculating the proportion of his campaign contributions that were unitemized.1 That was June 2016. I stopped writing because the general election demanded a … Read more
This is math, but it isn’t politics. This is serious business. This is the NFL. The New England Patriots won the coin toss to begin today’s AFC championship game against the Denver Broncos. With that, the Patriots have won 28 out of their last 38 coin tosses. To flip a fair coin 38 times and have … Read more
You know where you are? You’re down in the jungle baby, you’re gonna die… In the jungle…welcome to the jungle…. Watch it bring you to your knees, knees… – Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle” It’s a jungle out there, and … Read more
Yesterday, while actively following the events in Ferguson, I was asked the following by @GenXMedia: White Suburban America seems riddled with apathy, excuses and disconnect about #Ferguson. Any ideas why? Upon further prompting, it became clear that @GenXMedia wanted a response to each of the three things that White Suburban America is riddled with: apathy, excuses, and disconnect. It is important … Read more
This post by Ezra Klein discusses this study, entitled “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” by Dan M. Kahan, Erica Cantrell Dawson, Ellen Peters, and Paul Slovic. The gist of the post and the study is that people are less mathematically sophisticated when considering statistical evidence regarding a political issue. The study presented people with “data” from a (fake) experiment about the effect of a hand cream … Read more
It’s been too long since I prattled into cyberspace. This Monkey Cage post by Kyle Dropp Joshua D. Kertzer & Thomas Zeitzoff caught my contrarian attention. In a nutshell, it says that those who are less informed about the location of Ukraine are more likely to support US military intervention. This is an intriguing and policy-relevant finding … Read more
This Op-Ed in Forbes, “Almost Everything You Have Been Told About The Minimum Wage Is False,” by Jeffrey Dorfman, argues that increasing the federal minimum wage (1) would not affect as many people as you might think and (2) would not help the working poor as much as (say) teenagers. The first half of Dorfman’s Op-Ed … Read more
…but the notable is frequently unnoted. This post, along with the always thought-provoking repartee with my friend Chris Bonneau, inspires me to write a post about selection effects and their ability to magically turn a mountain into a molehill. The short version of the story is that a brouhaha was breaking out at the University … Read more
This opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled “Why We Make Bad Decisions,” by Noreena Hertz, explores the implications of a well-established psychological/behavioral phenomenon known as confirmation bias. In a nutshell, confirmation bias describes the general tendency to overweigh information in line with one’s prior beliefs and/or give too little weight to information contradicting those … Read more
A recurring apparent conundrum is the mismatch between Congressional approval (about 14% approval and 78% disapproval) and reelection rates (about 91% in 2012). If Americans disapprove of their legislators at such a high rate, why do they reelect them at an even higher rate? PEOPLE BE CRAZY…AMIRITE? Maybe. A traditional explanation is that people don’t … Read more