The Sleeping Beauty Paradox
This is my take on a classic probability paradox, the case of Sleeping Beauty. Along the way I’ll explain what I think is wrong with a classic rule of inference, Bayes’ Rule, and what needs to be done to fix it, but I hope you enjoy the paradox even if you don’t have a background in […]
The class size paradox
Today’s post is a short paradox about averages, and how they don’t always match expectations. Imagine you’re a freshman college student, happily confident of a personalized education—after all, your college boasts an average class size of a mere 10 students per course. But when you arrive, most of your classes have far more students than […]
There are a lot of people.
There are over 7,000,000,000 people in the world, over 320,000,000 of whom live in the United States alone. When I try to picture populations this big, I go “okay, a thousand people would be how many fit in a really big room, and then a million is… a lot more than that, and a billion […]