I wonder if a lot of movies would be viewed very differently if everyone watched the movie, weighed it in their own mind, before seeing any discourse about it? For instance, I feel sometimes the same type of things in a movie is at times viewed positively (e.g. an homage to the way the genre was done before) vs negatively (e.g. unrealistic and corny) just based on whether or not the public opinion is "this movie is good" or "this movie is bad."
As an example- everyone pretty much hates the fridge scene in Indiana Jones 4. And all the criticisms of it are true. It is very unrealistic. And it is corny. But also, I'm not sure it isn't very similar to scenes in beloved movies like it.
There was an interesting study I read about in the book The Drunkard's Walk where 10 competent, but unknown songs, were chosen, and volunteers listened to them, and gave them a thumbs up or thumbs down rating. It was done in two ways- way 1 every participant got to see the rankings from the people who went before, and way 2 everyone listened to the songs and just ranked them. In way 1, songs ran away with many thumbs up or thumbs down, where in way 2, some songs came out as rated better than others, but they stayed much closer to the middle.
Have read a few by leonard mlodinow. Started with The Drunkards Walk which was good, then read subliminal and Feynmans Rainbow. I would recommend them in that order. Drunkards walk
Just tell them you hear voices and they’ll let you in (even if you don’t actually hear voices, they will not sniff out your “obvious” sanity as backed up by an actual study I read about once—once they think of you as being mentally ill, that perception will color every observation they make of you from then on. I too lazy to go looking for the book to give a proper reference, but iirc the book’s title was The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. It was near 70% of the pages opened where he talked about it. Here’s the link
I was reading a math book from 2008, and it cited Trump as an example of negative return on investment. If you invested 10,000 with him, in 10 years you would have turned your investment into 600.
He was pegged as a failure YEARS before he opened his mouth politically, and was an example to be used in a math book.
For reference: https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175
Read The Durnkard's Walk if you ever have time. Randomness plays a much larger part in our lives than previously thought.
They refer to this in The Drunkard' Walk, but with pilots. (https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175)
We essentially have a skill level, but there are so many variables that some days you'll perform worse, some days you'll perform better. But overall, you'll tend to be closer to your normal skill level.
The Drunkard's Walk was a pretty interesting read about how randomness and our poor psychological understanding of it affects so many things. Its in the same sort of genre as a Freakonomics or Blink type thing I'd say.
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
I read this 5 or 6 years ago and really enjoyed it. Has a lot of math, but includes a lot of history and some psychology as well.
From the Amazon page:
"By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire."
For further information, the book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow contains a number of good examples of how humans have difficulties recognizing true randomness. For example, iTunes had to make the random play function less random in order to appear more random.
Learn about randomness and how it demonstrates that it's impossible to beat the market without fluking out. I recommend The Drunkard's Walk. (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp/0307275175)
It's written by the A Brief History of Time co-author Leonard Mlodinow but it's an incredibly easy read.
Read The Drunkard's Walk:How Randomness Rules Our Lives.
It is a wonderful book on statistical analysis as well as some math history. It is appoachable by both those with limited knowledge on the subjet as well as those that are already engrained in the subject.
If you're interested in math at all, I'd suggest The Drunkard's Walk by Mlodinow. It looks at the surprising role that randomness plays in, well, everything. Easy to read, given the sophisticated math at play.
http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175
Yeah, I didn't understand that point really correctly until I read The Drunkard's Walk. People vastly underestimate the role of randomness in how things are.
The Drunkard's Walk is a really good book for anyone struggling with self-doubt or anxiety over life choices.
Everyone's bad at reasoning about chance, here's a funny book with many great example. That book even uses the exact example of people - including doctors - rarely being able to correctly calculate the odds someone's sick given a problem like yours there. Hell: a lot of people can't even answer correctly: "If I flip a coin three times what are the odds it'll come up the same way all three times?". Prolific and well respected mathematician Paul Erdos struggled to intuitively understand the Monty Hall problem even though he conceded the mathematical proof was there.
If you're able to learn the answer, figure out how it works and start applying that sort of thinking to new problems you'll be fine. Next to nobody is able to just know the right way to approach probability problems without training.
Something like that. Basically the game is rigged in favor of those who are already winning and against those who are already losing. The more you win the easier it is to win, the more you lose the harder it is to win.
Most capitalists conveniently ignore that capitalism is only a meritocracy if we all started out financially equal, with equal quality parenting, equal quality education, equal mental and physical health, equal life advice, equally safe stable childhoods, ect.
This of course is not the case. It's absurd to think a kid growing up with a single mom dating whomever her current drug dealer happens to be, who molest her while her drug addled mom looks the other way, attending an inner city school that is more of a prison than a school, in a violent unsafe neighborhood, is just expected to figure it out and somehow get out in the real world and compete with affluent kids with private education, safe homes, responsible fathers and stay at home mothers who help them with homework, prep them for important things like ACT's, SAT's, college admissions, pay for college, ect.
Once you take reality into account there is nothing about capitalism that is meritocratic. There is very, very, rarely a truly self made man, most self described self made men are really delusional ingrates, *cough*, Elon, *cough*. Also many people are just lucky to be into the right thing at the right time? I know a tard who started a brewery right before the micro brew craze hit. He had no idea that would happen, but when it did by random luck he was in the right situation to capitalize on it and is very much a millionaire now. The fool seriously thinks he's some kind of business guru. Always giving the dumbest advice oblivious to the massive role luck played in his success. Sure he worked "hard" in the sense he wasn't lazy, but people in Amazon warehouses probably work harder.
And THAT is just the inequality facing people actually lucky enough to be born in the first world. Think about how little chance a capitalist world gives to people from countries that are already poor.
For further reading I suggest The Drunkards Walk, it explains the extent to which random luck controls our destiny. People just imagine themselves to be in control when they succeed because it flatters their ego, much like my brewmaster friend.
Not textbooks, but to help you develop a really good framework for statistical thinking and to get your feet wet in different subdisciplines, first try reading Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk & then Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics. Both books are very readable (targeted at non-technical audiences).
This is just straight up wrong. It's a coinflip on what is going to be popular and there are tons of confounding variables. This book goes into detail about it.
I recommend reading this book https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175
You're taking two observations and strongly correlating them, without actual evidence.
Check out this book http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0307275175
I'm not an expert on the subject by any means, but here is an interesting beginner's read: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives.
With the lottery numbers, a lot of it has to with our ability to recognize patterns and our own expectations. Given all the possible number combinations, some of them them will form easily recognizable patterns. Yours example is the basic case, and equally trivial, we could also have 10-11-12-13-14-15, or 05-10-15-20-25-30. The thing is, there are far more non-trivial or random combinations than there are trivial ones, so we come to expect that winning lottery numbers never have a recognizable pattern or conversely, that trivially-patterned numbers never win. Ironically, it's the very same pattern recognition faculties that incorrectly determines this "meta-pattern" in winning lottery numbers.
Another funny example of this effect occurred when Everest was first surveyed Wikipedia:
> Peak XV (measured in feet) was calculated to be exactly 8,839.2 m (29,000 ft) high, but was publicly declared to be 8,839.8 m (29,002 ft) in order to avoid the impression that an exact height of 8,839.2 metres (29,000 ft) was nothing more than a rounded estimate (in feet).
In other words, it's statistically impossible that a mountain can be exactly 29,000 ft high so the measurement must be in error. Just like we are biased to never expect patterns in lottery numbers, the Everest surveyors were biased to never expect perfectly rounded measurements.
?? Then read some statistics. Even if 100% of these anecdotes was made up, what do you think of this article?
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime/19439
You can debate cause, but there is data on this issue. If you think it's racist to keep track of the data, IMO you're part of the problem.
From the article:
>Judging from online comments, there is a wide spectrum of views on this, from unapologetic racism to militant refusal to blame the problem on anything but historic white racism.
IMO all the people described in that sentence are the problem. Shitty behaviour is shitty behaviour, and even if it's not always going to give you accurate conclusions if you treat anecdotes as data, it's pretty hard to ignore your lived experiences.
See: Drunkard's Walk if you want to see how often we do this.
http://www.amazon.ca/The-Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules/dp/0307275175
not engineering per-say, but i think all engineers should read "the drunkard's walk"