Pascal's Wager is an scenario where there is a potential for an infinite reward (heaven) and that overrides every other consideration. Pascal's Mugging is an scenario where the theological considerations are replaced with a more mundane setting, where we are faced with a being who claims to have supernatural powers, that will pay us greatly if we pay them a small sum in advance. I think the earliest example I could find online of this particular case was this 2000 paper from Alex Tabarrok, who presents a s…

Here at Nintil I claimed last year that it is unlikely that there is some new useful fundamental physics coming. When I've made this point in front of an audience, sometimes I've had to clarify myself a lot. I still think it's all mostly addressed in the post itself -, but the topic can do with some extra clarification. In this post I will also point to what I regard as the only candidates I'm aware of for useful fundamental physics Useful fundamental physics Fundamental physics By fundamental physics I mea…

Nintil aims to be the world's best blog as per my own criteria of what the best blog is, and one of my requirements is correctness, I want the things I say here to be accurate. It's hard to keep track of everything I've written, and I may overlook things. Sometimes it's just easier to see mistakes in other's work rather than on one's own. That's why, in the spirit of Donald Knuth I'm launching the "Prove me wrong, earn money!" rewards program. It covers everything I've published since 2017-01-01 a…

One of the Collison questions is Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it? Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the "2 Sigma Problem": how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (i.e., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring? In a related vein, this large-scale m…

Links since the last links post, plus a broader discussion of Peter Thiel’s recent public appearences. In my last links post I said that retracted papers are like zombies that keep going, getting more citations. But it could be worse! It could be that it is cited more approvingly after it gets retracted! What if you let Word2Vec loose on a corpus of materials science literature? Not only the learned embeddings make sense, but also may help make predictions about what materials will work in the futur…

It has been argued that in developed countries, or more concretely, in countries with higher gender equality, women are less represented in the STEM fields. Here I look at this claim and its veracity. This post was prompted by the comments of an anonymous reader, whom I thank for his thoughtful discussion of the issue at hand. Addendum Note (2019-07-01): @rubenarslan sent me some good points about this post; I am noting down here the key points. The correlation is probably not as strong, and the CIs around…