Anecdotes are not Evidence
Non-fiction books are notorious for relying on anecdotes instead of actual evidence to prove their points. Discerning readers must approach anecdotes with […]
Book summaries, podcast summaries, and some other things
Non-fiction books are notorious for relying on anecdotes instead of actual evidence to prove their points. Discerning readers must approach anecdotes with […]
This post is split out from my main summary of Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Check out […]
This post is split out from my main summary of Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Check out that summary to […]
This post is split out from my main summary of Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Check out that summary to […]
This post is split out from my main summary of Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Check out that summary to […]
I was listening to a podcast recently that talked about how people’s family situations and upbringings affected how they turned out. It […]
Objective ignorance is the idea that many things on which the future depends simply cannot be known.Objective ignorance is higher the longer into the future a prediction is. The future is messy and minor events can have large consequences. Many things are just unknowable.
The prosecutor’s fallacy and base rate fallacy are related ideas that both involve conditional probabilities. The prosecutor’s fallacy mixes up the probability that someone matches, given their innocence, with the probability that someone is innocent, given a match. You don’t care about the first probability – you already know there is a match.
There is a lot of bullshit out there, probably more than you think. It takes a lot more work to refute bullshit than to create it. Bergstrom and West describe how to spot some of the most common ways to spot bullshit so you can call it out.