prior probability

The data visualization below, which is especially timely given Putin’s recent threats (bluffs?) to use nuclear weapons, is part of a larger series of “bar chart races” that Frank Jacobs (Big Think) has compiled for us. Check out the entire series here. In the meantime, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

I have been meaning to blog about this perverse situation for years now and never got around to it, until today. According to this 2017 report by Caroline Simon in Forbes: “The ratio between administrators and faculty continues to shrink: … the number of faculty and staff per administrator declined roughly 40% at most types of colleges and universities between 1990 and 2012, now averaging around 2.5 faculty per administrator.” By way of example, check out this 2018 report by Darik Draplin in The College Fix: “Ohio State employs 88 diversity-related staffers at a cost of $7.3M annually.” Is this state of affairs true of other public and private universities? (See, for example, the chart below, which covers the University of California system, which has ten major campuses across the Golden State.) Either way, 87 of those 88 positions could have been actual instructors or researchers! (Also, how many of these diversity administrators are themselves diverse?)

Order yours here. Hat tip: @pickover.

It’s the 22nd year of the 21st Century, so can we just get rid of this arcane ritual once and for all?!

Raise a glass to freedom! Look into your eyes and the sky’s the limit.

Those are some of the lyrics from two of my favorite songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” musical, The Story of Tonight and Helpless. (PS: I previously posted my all-time Hamilton song on August 20, 2020.)

I posted a work of art by this great Ukrainian artist one week ago; here is another:

“Two letters by scholars, from Ukraine and Russia“. Hat tip: Brian Leiter.

Update (3/11): I woke up to some good news this morning: the Major League Baseball dispute referred to below has now been resolved. (I will blog more about MLB in the next day or two.)

• How many more regular-season games will the Commissioner of Major League Baseball cancel, and which side in this dispute will cave in first, the team owners or the players’ union?
• Is Putin really about to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, or is he just bluffing?
• More generally, how can we tell when a particular threat is genuine or fake?

We could use “game theory” to answer these questions (see here, for example), but game theory presumes hyper-rationality, to borrow my mentor Richard Posner’s apt term. But what happens when we are dealing with a mad despot or a group of greedy owners or an avaricious labor union? In short, we also need to add culture, emotions, and psychology into the mix, and that is why the best work in this area — what I like to call “the psychology of games” — is still this remarkable collection of illuminating essays from the 1950s a/k/a “The Strategy of Conflict“. (The author of those essays, my intellectual hero Thomas Schelling, is pictured below.)