Bad Probability
goodmath | May 4, 2010 I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to
another one, which I can't resist mocking.
As I've written about quite often, we humans really stink at
understanding big numbers, and how things scale.
href="http://thebeachnotes.blogspot.com/2010/05/tragedy-on-college-campuses.html">This
is an example of that. We've got a jerk who's about to graduate from a dinky
christian college, who believes that there must be something special
about the moral atmosphere at his college, because in his four years at the
school, there hasn't been a single murder…
goodmath | January 4, 2010 As you've surely heard by now, on christmas day, some idiot attempted to
blow up an airplane by stuffing his underwear full of explosives and then
lighting his crotch on fire. There's been a ton of coverage of this - most of
which takes the form of people running around wetting their pants in terror.
One thing which I've noticed, though, is that one aspect of this whole mess
ties in to one of my personal obsessions: scale. We humans are really,really lousy at dealing with big numbers. We just absolutely
have a piss-poor ability to really comprehend numbers, or to take what we
know, and put…
goodmath | August 3, 2009 I normally try to ignore things like this, but this is just too funny.
In general, I find arguments like this to be extremely silly. This is, basically, like
playing with gematria - only instead of doing real gematria (which can be quite silly enough),
it's like our friend "Gotcha" - mixing systems and screwing things up until you get the results
you want.
Lots of the particularly crazy strain of Christians really, desperately want to believe
that Barack Obama is the antichrist. They want an explanation for how this black man with
a muslim name could possible have actually been elected -…
goodmath | May 3, 2009 Via the Bad Astronomer comes one of the most pathetic abuses of
probability that I've ever seen. I'm simply amazed that this idiot was willing
to go on television and say this.
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The crank in question is Walter Wagner, the moron who tried to use a lawsuit
to stop the LHC from being activated. (Just that much, already, is amazingly silly;
he sued in Hawaii, but the LHC is in Geneva, Switzerland. How does…
goodmath | January 23, 2009 A simple, silly, but entertaining example of mathematical illiteracy by way of the Associated Press:
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- The odds are against something this odd. But a Nebraska Lottery official says there was no mistake: The same three numbers in Nebraska's Pick 3 lottery were drawn two nights in a row this week.
Lottery spokesman Brian Rockey said one of two lottery computers that randomly generate numbers produced the numbers 1, 9 and 6 -- in that order -- for Monday night's Pick 3 drawing. Rockey says the next night, the lottery's other computer produced the same three numbers in the same…
goodmath | December 1, 2008 One of the blogs I read regularly is Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science". I recommend
it highly. (Which reminds me that I really need to find some time to update my blogroll!) In saturday's entry, he discussed a BBC Radio documentary that described how Britain is becoming a much more welcoming place for Down's syndrome babies.
Ben did a good job of shredding it. But I also wanted to take a stab, focusing on
the mathematical problem that underlies it, because it's a great example of two very
common errors - first, the familiar confusing correlation and causation, and
second, using incorrect metrics…
goodmath | August 22, 2008 An alert reader sent me link to a
href="http://africa.reuters.com/odd/news/usnPEK21146.html">stupid
article published by Reuters about the Olympics and Astrology.
It's a classic kind of crackpot silliness, which I've described
in numerous articles before. It's yet another example of pareidolia - that is, seeing patterns where there aren't any.
When we look at large quantities of data, there are bound
to be things that look like patterns. In fact, it would be
surprising if there weren't apparent parents for us to find. That's
just the nature of large quantities of data.
In this case…
goodmath | July 31, 2008 Once again, you, my readers, have come through with some really high-grade crackpottery. This one was actually sent to me by its author, but I didn't really look at it until several readers sent me the same link because they thought it was my kind of material. With your recommendations, I took a look, and was rewarded. In a moment of hubris, the author titled itA Possible Proof of God's Existence from Multiverse Assumptions.
This article is basically a version of the classic big-numbers probabilistic
argument for God. What makes this different is that it doesn't line up a
bunch of fake…
goodmath | October 22, 2007 The bulk of this part of the review is looking at the total train-wreck that is chapter 4, which contains Bittinger's version of dreadful probabilistic arguments for
why Christianity must be true. But before I do that, I need to take care of one loose
end from part 1. I should have included chapter three in part one of the review, since it's really just a continuation of the paradox rubbish, but I didn't.
The basic idea behind chapter three is that Jesus is the most fundamental
resolution of paradox. All of the most important of the (Bittinger) paradoxes that we
encounter in our lives are…