A blog about math, philosophy, puzzles, politics, and more.
This is a map of Nassau Street, the northern edge of Princeton University. It's a very standard sort of street; I imagine one quite like it exists in most college towns. It has lots of great places to eat, shown on the map in orange. During my senior year, because of Princeton's absurdly expensive meal … Continue reading An exploration of exploitation bias
[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
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
(Related: Lofty expectations) In August of 1939, just as World War II was beginning, physicists Albert Einstein and LeĂł Szilárd wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, letting him know about the theoretical possibility of nuclear weapons and suggesting that the United States start a nuclear program. The letter resulted in the Manhattan Project, which led … Continue reading What to do about undefined expectations?
This is the excerpt for your very first post.
Unexpected Values 