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Monty Hall revisited
Chances are you’ve already heard about the Monty Hall problem. I wouldn’t be mentioning it at all, except that I keep reading descriptions of the problem that miss the absolutely critical point. For...
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The first thing you learned about probability is wrong*
*or dangerously incomplete. I’ve just started reading Against the Gods: The remarkable Story of Risk, a book by Peter Bernstein that’s been high on my “To Read” list for a while. I suspect it will be...
View ArticleA classification scheme for types of randomness
We often speak implicitly of different types of randomness but neglect to name or categorize them. Consider this post to be a kind of RFC or rough draft on the division of randomness into five...
View ArticleRecommendation of the week
“[I]f you have performed any statistical analysis that is more complex than calculating the mean and the standard deviation, you should perform the same analysis on noise to make sure that whatever...
View ArticleMy favorite randomization device
My recent look at JavaScript as a contender for statistical modeling got me thinking about the different methods used to create random variates. All computers algorithms create Type 1 randomness,...
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What are the chances this headline will still be true in 10 years?
In this post I’ll be discussing the ideas presented in The Half-Life of Facts, by Samuel Arbesman. The book argues that facts, which we often take to be iron-clad, unchanging laws of the universe, are...
View ArticleMorality needs probability, manifesto addendum
Just added to my Big Bright Green Manifesto Machine. You might need to read this through a couple times; it’s a difficult concept since it lives in a collective blind spot for us: Doing ethics without...
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A probability cookbook
Randomness – Probability = Chance Chance – Randomness = Fate Fate + God = Predestination Probability + Epistemology = Types of Randomness Subjective Probability = Betting + Coherence Propensity theory...
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Probability Podcast
UPDATE: RSS feed is here, let me know if you have any problems with it: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:18793848/sounds.rss I’ve produced a pilot episode of a “Probability Podcast”....
View ArticleRandom samples in JS using R functions
For a JavaScript-based project I’m working on, I need to be able to sample from a variety of probability distributions. There are ways to call R from JavaScript, but they depend on the server running...
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