prior probability

Check out this excellent report by Nigel Chiwaya, a data reporter for NBC News. Mr Chiwaya’s comprehensive report contains a complete compilation of who attacked whom (and how many times) during last night’s Democratic debate as well as a cool interactive graphic (see screenshot below). Also, if you check out Mr. Chiwaya’s previous visualizations of candidate attacks during the September Democratic Debate (12 Sept. 2019) and the October Debate (15 Oct. 2019), you will see an increase in the frequency of attacks over time.

Credit: NBC News

Also, check out this thread on Twitter.

Jerry Coyne ponders this question here. For my part, I am not persuaded by Coyne’s utilitarian defense of Gates (i.e. the fact that Gates has “donated” a lot of his wealth to charity) for two reasons. First, Coyne does not discuss the monopolistic source of Gates’s riches, and secondly, even if Gates were deserving of his incredible wealth, all he has done is “donate” those monies to himself via his own charity (the Gates Foundation). What’s so generous about such a self-serving tax write-off?

Did you know that a century ago eight players from the Chicago White Sox baseball club conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the 1919 World Series. Here is a recent op-ed (NYT) by John Thorn, a historian of Major League Baseball, about this incident, and here are two Wikipedia entries: “1919 World Series” and “Black Sox Scandal.”

Alas, according to this report (hat tip: @kottke), this infamous bridge in North Carolina was recently raised an extra eight inches (to 12′ 4″).

Continuing with my survey of illicit promises, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan and David A. Hoffman’s recent critique of hush contracts deserves mention. (Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania, published their powerful critique in The Atlantic.) Their Ivory Tower critique, however, is highly selective and downright dangerous: selective because it focuses only on a small subset of nondisclosure agreements, such as those involving prominent media men like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer; dangerous because Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman want State legislatures to criminalize the use of hush contracts by business firms. Or in their own words: Continue reading →

Thus far, we have surveyed three types of agreements or exchanges: illegal & immoral ones; legal & immoral ones; and illegal & moral ones. This leaves one last category–agreements that are both legal and moral. By definition, such exchanges are not illicit, since they raise neither legal nor moral issues; nevertheless, I include this fourth category for completeness. Don’t most confidentiality agreements or “hush contracts” fall into this category? To see why, I shall present a modified version of the famous “Prisoners’ Dilemma” to illustrate this category. Continue reading →