A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
[This is Part 3 of a three-part series on scoring rules. If you aren’t familiar with scoring rules, you should read Part 1 before reading this post. You don't need to read Part 2, but I think it's pretty cool.] In 9th grade I learned the difference between accuracy and precision from a classroom poster. … Continue reading Scoring rules part 3: Incentivizing precision
[This is Part 2 of a three-part series on scoring rules. If you aren't familiar with scoring rules (and Brier's quadratic scoring rule in particular), you should read Part 1 before reading this post. If you'd like, you can skip straight to Part 3.] One of the most important skills of good probabilistic forecasting is … Continue reading Scoring rules part 2: Calibration does not imply classification
Yesterday I submitted for publication a paper I've been working on for a long time. The paper was on scoring rules, which I think are really interesting. In this three-part series, I'll tell you a bit about scoring rules and hopefully convey why I find them so cool. In this post I'll define scoring rules … Continue reading Scoring rules part 1: Eliciting truthful predictions
This post is an endorsement of a Democratic candidate for president, but it is not a typical endorsement. When I set out to write this post, I didn't have a particular conclusion in mind. Instead, I figured out how I wanted to think about the primary, then did research on the underlying facts, and finally … Continue reading Thoughts on the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
[Content warning: spoilers for the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. With one exception, the spoilers are in footnotes (unless you have a broad conception of what constitutes a spoiler).] There are many things in this world. In order for something to be one of my favorite things, I need to like it quite a lot. It's … Continue reading My favorite puzzles from the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt
FiveThirtyEight just published an impressive, sophisticated model of the 2020 Democratic primaries. If you're at all interested in the primaries, take a look -- there's a lot of cool stuff there (they also published a pretty detailed methodology which I also recommend reading). Conveniently, if you scroll down to the bottom of their forecast and … Continue reading My 2020 Democratic primary predictions pass the smell test
In the spirit of Slate Star Codex, I will be offering some of my predictions for 2020. In January 2021 I will return to these and grade them. The predictions fall into three categories: US Politics (there are many of these since it's an election year), Personal (predictions about what I will do next year), … Continue reading Predictions for 2020
It's not every day that a presidential candidate stumps you with a really interesting math problem, but that's exactly what Pete Buttigieg did on Tuesday when he sent out the following email to his supporters: Pete’s Innovation Team handles data, engineering, and analytics responsibilities for the campaign, so you might not be shocked to learn … Continue reading Pete’s problem
[Thanks to Drake Thomas and Mike Winer for discussion.] In third grade math class, my teacher Ms. Potter taught my class about the mean, median, and mode of a list of numbers. What united these numbers, Ms. Potter told us, was that they were measures of central tendency: numbers that represented, in some sense, the … Continue reading Beyond the mean, median, and mode
In this day and age, celebrities have a lot of influence over our politics. Garthwaite and Moore estimated that Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 netted him an extra 1 million votes [1]. More recently, an Instagram post by Taylor Swift led over 160,000 Americans to register to vote prior to the 2018 … Continue reading Finding Shawn Mendes
Unexpected Values 