Regaining control in an increasingly complex world
Earlier this week, in the midst of a wildly stressful couple of weeks, I got a rude red “positive” light on the Metrix reader running my COVID-19 test. These tests have a 99% specificity (i.e., they give a negative result for 99% of samples that don’t have COVID in them). So from a naïve perspective, it would seem that seeing the red “positive” light on the reader would mean there was only a 1%…
Editorial Note : I had been hoping to spend much more time on this article, going through some further stages of drafting, producing a shorter blog-length version with fewer details, and exploring all of the authors’ supplemental material and perhaps even asking them to weigh in, but the discussion about this study has exploded in several circles I’m involved in, so given the speed of internet…
A few years back, I read an anecdote somewhere on the web by a guy whose boss had won an all-expenses-paid trip to see an NFL game with amazing seats. The following Monday, the author asked him how it had gone. “Oh, it was terrible,” he says. “My nachos were too cold.” The author’s point was, how much must it suck to be someone for whom nachos that are the wrong temperature can ruin an entire…
I did an informal study on my 13 years of Anki spaced-repetition history to settle a team question at RemNote : is our “Anki SM-2” algorithm (and Anki’s SM-2 algorithm itself) too aggressive when scheduling overdue cards? Somewhat to my surprise, and also to my embarrassment because I’ve been defending the current behavior without data for many years, the answer appears to be yes – although it…
In my post on contraception , I mentioned emergency contraception only in passing, as something that was out of scope, but it’s come to my attention that there are also important and underconsidered differences in effectiveness here, and that most people are woefully underinformed or even misinformed about EC in general, so here’s something to bring you up to speed if you need it. When I started…
One of my Big Serious Goals for 2023 is to become more socially connected and make more really good friends in my new city, where I hope to be for some time to come, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading about what seems to be making this harder in recent years. This leads naturally to a bunch of related topics, like why our kids and teenagers seem to be more unhappy on average lately, why the…
Figures expressed in percentages are ubiquitous, and interpreting and doing calculations with them is an important part of the basic mathematical literacy useful in everyday life. Yet few points of arithmetic are as confusing and full of traps for the unwary as percentages. I recently got fed up with being unable to think clearly about percentages myself, so I figured I’d write this article to…
Two quick announcements this week. 1: A home for short posts I’ve started a microblog at https://ap.sorenbjornstad.com . ( ap stands for attopublish , the mini-site builder that I’m developing concurrently with writing on the microblog.) The purpose is twofold. First, I’m publishing new stuff in a lot of places nowadays: here, my YouTube channel , my Zettelkasten , etc. For folks who want to…
An old legend tells of a Western anthropologist researching an indigenous community in the jungle. He was on a journey with some guides when they stopped for the night and he found a nice sleeping spot under a dead tree. The guides were horrified and refused to let him sleep there, citing the risk that a branch, or the whole tree, would fall on him in the night. He thought this was absurd,…
[Cloud computing] allows people to read and modify word-processor files, spreadsheets, and presentations using a smartphone on the toilet. This is generally regarded as progress. —Andrew Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems There was a time, not so very long ago, when walking out your door meant you were no longer reachable by anyone who wasn’t physically next to you. At the time of this writing,…