mathbabe

Interestingly (on reflection, not surprisingly) since going back to RSS, I've been reading a lot more from sites with expert content, but ugly typography. - Math Babe (https://mathbabe.org) + Superb musings and coverage on the societal impact of everything becoming a prediction problem (occasional applied technical discussion) - Tech Dirt (https://www.techdirt.com/) + Lawyers Rule Everything Around Me - Light Blue Touchpaper (https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org) + Thoughts on infosec from Cambridge Computer Laboratory (influential on policy, excellent coverage of conferences) - Muckrock (https://www.muckrock.com/) + News from the FOIA wars

'The Cartoon Guide to Statistics', Gonick might be useful. A number of smart people [1][2] recommend it. [1] http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/36-220/syllabus.pdf [2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/07/11/the-lede-program-students-are-rocking-i…

mathematical proofs are difficult enough to follow without having to guess the action of the operators involved. What Heaviside did was the sort of fast-and-loose syntactic manipulation that makes mathematicians queasy and/or indignant [1]. He treats the derivative operator just like it were an ordinary number X. And then he infers that 1/X must mean integration. Compare to the naive argument for the positive integers 1+2+3+... summing to -1/12 that gets mathbabe's panties in a twist [2]. More details in Ch. 10 of Nahin's book. [1] http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/2007/12/07/heavisides-operator-calcu… [2] http://mathbabe.org/2014/01/21/if-its-hocus-pocus-then-its-not-math/

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Wow! That was an amazing read! These old articles might be of some interest as well: http://today.uconn.edu/blog/2012/10/the-mochizuki-theorem-when-youre-s… http://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-been-proved/

Keep in mind guys that this is the same person who wrote about Nate Silver confusing cause and effect. Which was also thoroughly wrong (you can find the reasons why it is wrong in the first post of the hn link). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4949103 http://mathbabe.org/?s=nate+silver

Of course science is political. What isn't? I have a feeling that non-scientists see science as an invisible ethereal, platonic construct that's slowly being unveiled by hardy explorers, uh I mean scientists, until at last the whole of the Truth and nothing but the Truth fully shines in its enlightening splendor. Except that's not how it works. In practice, science works by scientific consensus. What is true is what the community decides is true. The community can be convinced otherwise by contradicting evidence (or not) but the process of convincing is then subject to all the biases affecting our feeble human minds: it can be contradictory with other evidence, misinterpreted, misunderstood, deemed insufficient, coming from the wrong person, etc. It takes a lot of time for the consensus to evolve, and it's a rather a messy and political affair. There's often a running joke that a theory's acceptance depends on the old guard dying out and being replaced by the younger, more open-minded generation (relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works) Btw, just in case you're wondering, math is absolutely not immune from this either. Cathy O'Neil wrote an excellent post detailing how mathematical proofs work in real life (and not in some platonic imaginary world invented by laymen): https://mathbabe.org/2012/08/06/what-is-a-proof/ also with a relatively recent example: https://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-been-proved…

"Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success." This is def consistent my personal experience... Not so much sexism (nowadays at least) but a strange mix of ageism, cult of innate 'genius', and gymnastics/ballet-like, endurance/bravado-focused ultracompetitiveness [1,2,3]. I increasingly blame Hardy's bestseller --and his abiding influence on mathematics culture worldwide-- for it. (Also I can't believe such a diss was accepted in the first place... Sign of changing times.) [1] https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/15/i-love-math-and-i-hate-the-fields-meda… [2] http://listeningtogolem.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-invisible-pachyderm-a… [3] https://mathbabe.org/2015/01/16/representation-of-women-and-the-genius…

> There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist. I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation. Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them: http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493654950/weapons-of-math-destruction-ou… https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/12/weapon-of-math-destruction-risk-based-…

> You didn't really address the examples which mschuster91 provided and that's important to understanding the problem: On the contrary, I addressed it entirely. mschuster91 seems to be under the impression that the teacher evaluation schemes boil down to nothing but the simplest possible before-after comparison of grades of students, ignoring all issues of demographics, differing student quality, differing school circumstances, etc. Such a scheme is indeed absurd, as his counterexample proves, but it is not what has been proposed by pretty much everyone! The actual proposals are well aware of what he thinks is the fatal problem, and go to often elaborate lengths to model and adjust for these sorts of heterogeneities in order to quantify the value-added of a particular teacher. The problem is recognized, included, and mostly dealt with. Whether the solution works entirely or is worthwhile is unclear, but he's arguing against a strawman. > One estimate has ~12% of NYC public school teachers being punished by the flawed VAM in use there: So I've looked at http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/02/the-arbitrary-punishment-of-new-york-te… and I have zero idea what she is trying to show. She assumes independence and treats it as a coin flip. Ummm.... what? With that sort of logic, you could show no one could expect to score a 1600 on the SAT. When criticized she links to a real analysis†, which shows considerable non-independence which means her numbers are wrong and…

After reading these other comments, I Googled David E. Shaw and found this: http://mathbabe.org/2012/04/05/it-sucks-to-be-rich/. (WARNING: Not sure of the validity of these stories, but they're interesting.) > First example: David hires a Ph.D. in English literature (he has a thing for “geniuses”, even in the mail room) to test mattresses for him. So that person’s job is to sleep on 15 different mattresses, for 8 nights each, and draw up a report to tell him the pros and cons of each mattress. This is to avoid him having an uncomfy night’s sleep. That’s what the risk was that we were avoiding with that. > Second example: David wants to be sure his trip to California goes smoothly, so he hires a Ph.D. in Something to take the exact same trip – same car service to the NY airport, same flight (same seat on plane!), same car service upon arrival, same hotel, exactly a week before his trip (due to understood seasonality issues of air travel) – to make sure there are no snags, and to draw up the report that presumable explains how much leg room there was in his plane. As an aside, their research group encouraged me to apply for a position shortly before I graduated college. The application asked for things like SAT/ACT scores and (number of) lines of code written in various languages. I thought my application looked pretty good, but I guess my ACT score was too low for them to consider me (even potentially!) brilliant. I still feel kind of bitter about that.

Related from 2013: https://mathbabe.org/2013/07/30/the-stacks-project-gets-ever-awesomer-… (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054838, but nothing else there)

As a normal human I naturally typed in "fuck" in a new search engine and it led me to this article https://mathbabe.org/2015/06/22/fuck-trigonometry/ which I quite enjoyed!

There's good reason to be skeptical of AI as it is. Here's a couple of reasons Racial bias in facial recognition: "Error rates up to 34% higher on dark-skinned women than for lighter-skinned males. "Default camera settings are often not optimized to capture darker skin tones, resulting in lower-quality database images of Black Americans" https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-… Chicago’s “Heat List” predicts arrests, doesn’t protect people or deter crime: https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/18/chicagos-heat-list-predicts-arrests-do…

This. And since certain companies/industries pose a certain "systemic risk," failing to self-regulate might lead to external regulation later. For example, legislation on AI, predictive models, and facial recognition in policing. Who knows, we could see limits on the use of imperfect models in other areas. After all, there is no "market solution" for ethics. https://mathbabe.org/2013/11/12/there-is-no-market-solution-for-ethics…

Also the post-2008 financial crisis austerity programs based on Excel analysis. https://mathbabe.org/2013/04/17/global-move-to-austerity-based-on-mist…

Not always... Its been found that what most have called charity is actually predatory lending by another name. I’m sure there are some legit players but like most things in life you may need to read the fine print and get a lawyer. Source: https://mathbabe.org/2015/10/13/microfinance-is-mostly-a-scam/

I agree that it's hard to get good predictions. The point, however, is that ignoring systemic bias and other historic influences is worse. > and start being facts with unjust causes. Of course. That means you know the data contains an "unjust" bias. Do you want to account for that bias, or do you want to proceed anyway risking problems (e.g. Simpson's Paradox). There are more confounding factors in heaven and earth, closeparen, than are dreamt of in your model. https://mathbabe.org/2017/01/04/recidivism-risk-algorithms-are-inheren… https://mathbabe.org/2013/01/29/bill-gates-is-naive-data-is-not-object…

Also has a great list of other blogs, most of which are my favorites now too. https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/ here's a copy+pastable list: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ http://danluu.com/ https://aphyr.com/ http://www.elidedbranches.com/ http://composition.al/blog/2015/03/31/what-isnt-a-key-value-store/ https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2016/03/29/0 http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style.html http://akaptur.com/blog/2014/08/03/getting-started-with-python-interna… http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/142387131042/nodejs-left-… http://embedded.fm/blog/takingaparttoys http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-mccarthy-papers-in… https://mathbabe.org/2016/03/30/apple-vs-fbi-nobody-won/

Here is the author's guest post providing background for this plugin - https://mathbabe.org/2017/03/31/guest-post-make-your-browsing-noiszy/

I don't know about these guys, but according to Cathy O'Neil, D. E. Shaw profited by anticipating (c.f. index front-running) pension funds in a way that sickened her to the point of quitting. https://mathbabe.org/2011/06/24/working-with-larry-summers-part-2/

Context: http://mathbabe.org/2013/07/30/the-stacks-project-gets-ever-awesomer-w…

What I understood from http://mathbabe.org/2015/12/15/notes-on-the-oxford-iut-workshop-by-bri… (posted elsewhere here), is that the problem stems from differing motivations. On one hand, Mochizuki wants to make his proof fullyt complete and correct (being both fully general and covering all special cases), but the community wants broad strokes intuitions. From Mochizuki's perspective, he has told everyone how things fit together, but fit together means something different for others. The workshop attendees want to know what things they can gloss over to get the big picture, but as of yet, nobody who understands the proof has succeeded in communicating that information, probably because they don't share the same motivation.

Here's a detailed report on the situation from one Brian Conrad, who attended the meeting: http://mathbabe.org/2015/12/15/notes-on-the-oxford-iut-workshop-by-bri…

Well, when the data looks like this... http://mathbabe.org/2012/03/06/the-value-added-teacher-model-sucks/ That could be embarrassing. "Objective" teacher performance measures all seem to be as bad as, if not worse than measuring programmer performance with SLOC. Oddly enough it looks like the proposals he was trying to ram through in New Jersey look like a attempt at teacher union busting. Why Zuckerberg would involve himself in that is a bit of a mystery. While he seems to be the public face, it could be that a lot of the money doesn't come from him.

it is not a proof until you have convinced at least one other [qualified] person. related rant [1] [1] http://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-been-proved/

"Mathbabe" is currently working on something similar: http://mathbabe.org/2014/08/28/a-decision-tree-for-decision-trees/ even if she has just started working on this (and she mentions the OP item herself).

Privacy laws also protect the people who don't think about privacy. Those are the ones most susceptible to being manipulated by people tracking their activities. See http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/26/what-privacy-advocates-get-wrong/

A blog post which writes about someone who interviewed with the NSA: http://mathbabe.org/2012/08/25/nsa-mathematicians/ Choice quote: ‘Out of the 6 or 7 people I met, everyone but one person responded along the lines, “I believe everything the United States Government does is good.”’

I thought this post from that blog was interesting: Why "MathBabe"? http://mathbabe.org/2011/06/13/why-mathbabe/ Actually there’s another reason I ultimately decided to call this blog “mathbabe,” namely when I googled it[...] there’s another site with a very similar name which simply shows nearly naked women next to cliff notes on basic math subjects. WTF?!? It is ridiculously obvious to me that math babes should be doing math, not adorning it. So I kind of had to call myself mathbabe after that.