According to Wikipedia, asteroids with a 1 km diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years on average. Moreover, “Large collisions–with 5 km (3 mi) objects–happen approximately once every twenty million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago.” You do the math …
prior probability asks, should you walk or stand when your are going up (or down) an escalator? The solution to this problem is apparently non-trivial. Here, for example, is one recent BBC report on this question. Here is another take on this question, and here is yet another. Don’t these conflicting behaviors and approaches to escalator travel falsify F.A. Hayek’s famous “spontaneous order” thesis?
I
llustration by Helen Tseng for the Bold Italic website
Hat tip (again) to Tyler Cowen and John B. Chilton
… because airports like SFO are criminalizing rideshare apps like Lyft, Sidecar and Uber. The title of this report, for example, says it all: “SFO Officials Make Citizen Arrests Of Internet Rideshare Drivers.” According to this report, San Francisco International Airport officials have been citing and arresting drivers from mobile-app enabled rideshare companies that pick up and drop off passenger. This, of course, is total poppycock for passengers. Another reason why licensed taxi drivers, with the backing of local governments, are just legalized thieves.
prior probability really enjoys Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias and admire his cutting-edge academic work, especially his project on prediction markets. Recently, Hanson proposed a number of reasons why people might reasonably refuse to place bets to back up their beliefs. Although betting might not be justified in some social situations, why is private betting illegal carte blanche in most places? After all, people are allowed to bet on stocks and other securities, and all decisions are fraught with some level of risk and uncertainty, so why shouldn’t people be free to openly place bets on whatever events or contingencies they want to bet on?
The legal position in the US, or what prior probability likes to call “legal failure” as opposed to “market failure,” does not allow one to run a real prediction market with real money, but now that intrade has shut down, our dream is to one day start up a collaborative and user-friendly prediction market in which people could legally place bets on various propositions, such as the outcome of a legal case, the outcome of an election, or the outcome of a proposed piece of legislation (i.e. the likelihood that a proposed bill will be approved by both houses of Congress).
So what’s stopping us, other than the legal system?
Is an exam just a game played between students and professors, a game in which students try to guess what will be on the exam and professors try to outwit their students? If so, what is the optimal study strategy for students, and likewise, what is the optimal exam design for professors: open or closed book? Here is one of my favorite posts from one of my favorite blogs, cheaptalk.org … Enjoy, and tell me what you think.
Today’s Times reports that Garry Davis, a modern-day Quijote and “dean of the One World movement” who renounced his US citizenship in Paris on 25 May 1948, has died.
The moribund One World movement poses two puzzles: why do nation-states still exist, and why do “free countries” still have closed borders?
According to the Times, “… Mr. Davis’s long insistence on the inalienable right of anyone to travel anywhere prefigures the present-day immigration debate by decades. It likewise anticipates the current stateless conditions of Julian Assange and Edward J. Snowden.”
prior probability asks, if “free trade” makes economic sense, then why don’t we have an international treaty for “free peoples” … the free movement of goods and people across open borders?
What do you think?
Watson, a super-computer built by IBM, is capable of answering questions posed in plain English, an in 2011, Watson competed on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” and won. Assuming the Turing Test is a valid test of artificial intelligence, prior probability asks, what is the probability that Watson could pass such a test?
Postscripts: This youtube video (dated 19 April 2012) poses the same question. Here is another (pre-Jeopardy!) response to this same question.
John Danaher, a lecturer at Keele University, has a great blog called Philosophical Disquisitions. He recently wrote a very helpful review of a thought-provoking paper titled “Abortion and Moral Risk” by Dan Moller, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Moller’s fascinating paper and Danaher’s two-part review — here is part one, and here is part two — are worth reading on their own merits.
prior probability is fascinated by the problem of moral risk, or the possibility that one’s moral judgements might be wrong, because this possibility appears to open up a probabilistic approach to morality … that is, if people end up making Type I and Type II errors when reasoning about ethics and morality, then by definition there is some positive probability that people’s moral judgements might be wrong! And this possibility of moral error gives me a whole new way of looking at the ideas of Plato, Kant, Mill, etc.
The trial of Private Bradley Manning, who has been charged by the US Government with “aiding the enemy,” is coming to an end. Although the Manning case is far more important than the Trayvon Martin case, it has received much less publicity and scrutiny. Why?
In any case, who is the real “enemy” in this case? Isn’t it all those government officials who have tried to hide the truth about the war in Iraq? If so, what is the probability that Private Manning will be acquitted of the charge of “aiding the enemy”?
Update (30 July): A military court has just acquitted Private Manning of “aiding the enemy”!
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