Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Review of Misak: Ramsey’s romantic interlude
Previously, I described Frank Ramsey’s powerful critique of John Maynard Keynes’s logical or objective approach to probability. (For the record, Ramsey published his review of Keynes’s Treatise on Probability in the January 1922 issue of Cambridge Magazine, while he was still an … Continue reading
Review of Misak: Ramsey against the world
Part II of Cheryl Misak’s beautiful intellectual biography of Frank Ramsey is devoted to the young Ramsey’s undergraduate years at Cambridge University. (I reviewed Part I in my previous post.) If there is a common or overarching theme during these … Continue reading
Review of Misak: Ramsey’s boyhood
I mentioned in my previous post that I would review Cheryl Misak’s intellectual biography of Frank Ramsey in three parts, beginning with Ramsey’s boyhood years. Although there is no direct evidence that Ramsey was exposed to the rigors of probability … Continue reading
Review of Misak (2020), part 1
Among other things, Frank Ramsey (b. 1903, d. 1930) was one of the first scholars, along with Bruno de Finetti, to formalize the “logic of partial belief” or the subjective view of probability. (For this reason alone, I count Ramsey … Continue reading
Visualization of pi
Happy Pi Day! u/Olivesan created this 100 x 100 visualization of the first 10,000 digits of pi using the HTML5 canvas element and JavaScript. Each digit of pi is represented by the following color: 0: White 1: Red 2: Orange … Continue reading
Another day, another illustration of the base rate fallacy (a/k/a probability neglect)?
Update (3/14): Elon Musk agrees with our analysis. As you may have heard by now, President Donald J. Trump has restricted travel between the United States and most of Europe for 30 days, while Adam Silver, the Commissioner of the … Continue reading
Spring break readings
It’s my favorite week of the spring semester. I get to stay home, ignore emails, and spend time with my family. I can also devour as many books and scholarly papers as I want. Among many other things, I am … Continue reading
Visualization of the base rate fallacy (Coronavirus edition)
To understand the “base rate fallacy” in the Coronavirus context, compare the frequency of “media mentions” of various recent viruses (top image) with the actual number of infections (bottom image) caused by each of these viruses. See also this recent … Continue reading
Bernie, Fidel, and Socialist Statistics
Why does politics make people so damn stupid? Shout out to Frederick M. Hess and Brendan Bell for their compelling critique of socialist statistics and progressive naiveté. Here is my favorite quote from their excellent piece: “Like data on Chinese … Continue reading

