Category Archives: Probability

Taxonomy of univariate distributions

Posted on September 18, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Posted in Mathematics, Probability | 2 Comments

Cars kill more people than guns

Posted on September 15, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Claudia Dreifus, a writer for the NY Times, recently interviewed Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. The subject of the interview is Humes’s latest book (pictured below) on the deadly dangers of automobiles. The book is titled “Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious … Continue reading →

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Ethics, Law, Probability | 4 Comments

Simple Explanation of the Monty Hall Problem

Posted on September 14, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

This is the simplest and fastest explanation of the Monty Hall Problem we have ever seen.

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Games, Probability | 4 Comments

Lon Fuller’s Speluncean Explorers

Posted on August 29, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

In our previous post, we mentioned Peter Suber’s beautiful book on Lon Fuller’s fictional “Case of the Speluncean Explorers.” By way of background, this hypothetical case occurs in the year 4300 A.D. in the Commonwealth of Newgarth. The relevant facts … Continue reading →

Posted in Ethics, Law, Philosophy, Probability, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

“Choking and Excelling at the Free Throw Line”

Posted on July 28, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

That is the title of this excellent empirical study by Darrell Worthy, Arthur Markman, and Todd Maddox. In case you’re wondering, their data set was comprehensive: it consisted of all free throws attempted during the last minute of all regular-season … Continue reading →

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Probability, Sports | Leave a comment

Contagion theory of violence

Posted on July 25, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Check out this provocative open-access paper titled Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings (Towers, et al., 2015). Here is an extended excerpt (footnotes omitted): “We fit a mathematical contagion model to the data sets, with model terms that take … Continue reading →

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Mathematics, Probability | 2 Comments

2016 presidential election forecast

Posted on July 1, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Happy Canada Day! Check out this election forecast from our friends at FiveThirtyEight. Is Nate Silver underestimating Trump’s chances again? Or does Clinton really have this locked up?

Posted in Current Affairs, Politics, Probability | 2 Comments

Price effects, virtue effects, and the law

Posted on June 26, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Richard Craswell, a law professor at Stanford, once posed the following question in his paper titled “Promises and Prices”: why do economists and philosophers who study law differ so greatly in the relevance they assign to price effects. Here is … Continue reading →

Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Ethics, Law, Probability | 2 Comments

Brexit odds

Posted on June 23, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

As a public service, let’s translate these betting odds into plain English. If a bettor wagers £10 that a majority of voters in Britain will vote to leave the European Union (“leave”), odds of 6/1 implies that the bettor stands to make … Continue reading →