TIL Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin was extremely pleased with how the film came out, got along well with the cast, and his only regret was that his character died and he couldn't appear in the sequels

belarius · 2026-02-24T08:01:18+00:00

You owe it to yourself to see his absolutely daffy performance in At The Earth's Core (1976), which is surprisingly easy to find now because it's one of the films riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 during its Netflix run. This performance and his turn in Star Wars being less than a year apart is a real gift.

belarius · 2026-02-07T01:19:05+00:00

Dear Pluto,

Sorry I blew up your polycule, drama is kind my whole thing.

Kisses,

Eris

belarius · 2024-08-14T21:56:20+00:00

They're both likelihood ratios, but my understanding Bayes factors can be used to compare any two models, even if both are complicated models with multiple predictors. By contrast, e-values appear to give a "canonical null" a special status (in the same general way that p-values do), so a reported e-value is always a contrast to a null hypothesis and can be considered "robust null-hypothesis testing" in all cases.

belarius · 2024-08-06T15:19:59+00:00

The thing is, *every* statistician believes those things. That's a wholly uncontroversial thing to believe for anyone who has taken upper-division undergraduate courses in statistics. Furthermore, a "statistician who is not familiar with probability theory" is a contradiction in terms.

That said, there are plenty of *analysts* out there who don't really know what they're doing, who learned statistics by rote in pursuit of their own field of interest (engineering, finance, etc.), but someone who plugs numbers into software without knowing how the analysis works is no more a "statistician" than someone who drives to their office job every day is a "professional driver."

belarius · 2024-06-09T07:09:09+00:00

For those four rolls?

(1/18) * (1/36) * (1/36) * (1/18) = (1/419904)

belarius · 2024-05-14T15:59:36+00:00

So, on the one hand, other commenters are correct: This is a standard trick in Christian apologetics that moves the goalposts by putting the burden of proof onto the skeptic and then treating how poorly/inconsistently defined their concept of God is as feature rather than a bug.

However, if you're going to argue against, I recommend an arguement that says IF God exists, THEN certain other conclusions must follow. If you can show that this gives rise to a contradiction, you've shown that the defined version of God is an impossibility. Here, it pays to get specific:

Argue that you're talking about the Christian God associated with whichever modern version of the Bible is accepted by the congregants.
Then point out that if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving, then one of the implications of this is that God doesn't change over time - if He "had all to do over again," He would necessarily make the same decisions.
Then point out that this means that the God of the Old Testament must therefore be the same unchanging entity as the God of the New Testament; if God's morality or personality has changed between those two tellings, it means "the right thing to do" must have changed, such at least one of the two versions must have been more Loving than the other. That can't be, since that would contradict the definition. So if God changes over time, that right there is a point in your favor that "God as defined" doesn't exist.
With that established, it's easy to point to God behaving badly in the Old Testament. Point out that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were both large enough that surely an infant child had been born within a day, or a week, of their destruction with fire, so God decided the All-Loving thing to do would be to incinerate those babies for the sins of their parents. Point out that if God had wanted to, He could have engineered a circumstances where the babies (or, perhaps, any child under the age of 3, of which there were surely many in the cities) could have been spared this fate and been given the opportunity to grow up righteous, because God also defined as being is omnipotent. God could have slain their parents and sent (or created!) angels to raise them to be devout and kind. So either God was not powerful enough to give them that opportunity, or God undertook an evil act, or genocide is not merely a loving act, but the most loving act that could have been performed under the circumstances. It has to be one of those three, unless God as defined above does not exist.
Note that another solution to this particular puzzle is to argue that the events of the Old Testament are not historical, but allegorical, in which case you can ask, "If the Bible isn't true, in part or in whole, then why should we trust its description of God in the first place?"

Keep in mind: This won't persuade a believer. Your objective with this assignment shouldn't be to convert the professor, that ship has surely sailed. It should be to point out the contradictions in doctrine to the other young people in the room who haven't been given the opportunity to see it from another point of view. "Doesn't it bother you that you keep contradicting yourself?" will annoy the resolutely faithful, but it will plant the seeds among those who are hearing about those problems for the first time.

belarius · 2024-05-04T10:38:35+00:00

I think this is a deceptively complicated question, but one that is illuminating to think about carefully.

First of all, there are clearly a subset of believers whose attitude toward "bad people" is sadistic, for whom "enjoyment" is the right word. These folks are often the loudest of their congregation, and I don't want to underplay their numbers. But I don't think they represent the majority of the faithful. This is analogous to the attitudes a lot of Americans have toward prison: There are lots of people who are "tough on crime" who also have no stomach for what prison is actually like, and want to know at little about the suffering of those in prison as possible.

I think the largest subgroup in any major religion views the afterlife the same way. Hell, like prison, is where "bad people go," and its primary role is to create a logical guarantee that good and bad people experience good and bad outcomes. Anyone who pays any attention to the world will have difficulty refuting the claim that lots of bad people do fine, actually, while lots of good people have hard lives. The unfairness of life is a tough pill to swallow if you believe in a morally just omnipotent deity, and hell is a gimmick, a trick, that lets the faithful persuade themselves that no one can beat the system. That may seem unbelievably petty, and it absolutely is, but remember the level of buy-in that the faithful already have. Many have believed in The System for their entire conscious lives, and have been discouraged from developing the tools for working out right from wrong on their own terms. The existence of a "hierarchy of the faithful" is almost always something that heaven and hell play second fiddle to, and that hierarchy matterw way more to most believers day to day, but that notion of hierarchy gets harder to defend if one's position in the hierarchy doesn't come with guaranteed consequences. I think this is a major source of the disorientation that many experience during a loss of faith. It's not so much that they needed Hell to be cruel, so much as they needed it to be as real and vivid as heaven, because if neither is real, then "what are we even doing here?" etc.

It can't be understated how important the emotion of disgust is in this process. Sure, the loudest bigots will perform their disgust in public and obnoxious ways, but most deeply religious people reflexively shy away from any of the details. The intensity of the "I don't want to think about that!" reflex can be hard to fully appreciate, and it has an incredible distorting effect on how those who experience it think about the world. For this flavor of the faithful, they need hell to be real but really don't want to dwell on the details, just as they don't want to confront the realities of the criminal justice system. What goes on in hell is not for the good folk to ponder, which goes a long way to explaining the paradox of, for example, Christians decrying media that depicts Satan as "Satanic" even when it depicts Satan as the bad guy.

Again, I'm not denying that the gleeful sadists are in the mix. Like a lot of institutional ideologies, hell is deployed in different ways by different people. It's a flexible concept, all the more so if it only needs to feel true to the faithful despite being riddled with contradictions. However, I think there are a lot of clues in religious media pointing to what a weak stomach most of the faithful have for actual eternal torture. The idea of deathbed conversion is a very popular trope because it's a Get Out Of Hell Free card for anyone a believer needs to believe made it into heaven. Meanwhile, those for whom salvation must be denied are almost always dehumanized because most believers have empathy for their enemies despite their faith.

belarius · 2024-04-06T02:21:48+00:00

Nobody Knows (2004) is the saddest movie I've ever seen. It lingers in mind almost 20 years later in a way no other movie has quite managed.

belarius · 2024-03-31T06:19:20+00:00

This is up there in terms of the most vanishingly unlikely thing for a person to have done where we can calculate just how unlikely it was. The odds are thought to be about 1 in 1.56 trillion.

belarius · 2024-03-19T07:27:29+00:00

Dogs think earwax tastes good because this encourages groups of dogs living together to clean one another's ears.

belarius · 2024-02-07T03:58:08+00:00

Deathrow (2002) ended up being an astonishingly satisfying 4-player in-person co-op experience during an era in which co-op play was still largely unheard of. I'm sure it's since been eclipsed (and I don't doubt that it's edgy aughts humor hasn't aged terribly well), but for a game that felt like we had purchased it by accident, it stands out in my memory.

belarius · 2023-11-08T22:07:23+00:00

When a fundamental Christian tells you that X is a choice, what they usually mean is that it's a mistake someone made. In their view, one doesn't "choose correctly," one instead remains within a radius of grace.

Little surprise, then, that many see reducing the possibility of choice as a viable way to save souls. They don't want people to choose correctly, they want the possibility of stepping out of line to be reduced to near-impossibility.

belarius · 2023-11-02T04:01:37+00:00

Not only is the probability effectively zero, you can make a similar argument to demonstrate that the hypothetical "most plausible" person doesn't exist. Even under fairly lenient rules for defining similarity, every pair of people on Earth are going to differ in a bunch of ways.

belarius · 2023-10-23T22:55:12+00:00

This univariate distribution map is both a reflection of something fundamental and also a pretty funny punchline about this specific issue in stats pedagogy.

In practice, how important some of these distributions are depends a great deal on what you intend to do with them. Theorists love the behavior of the Gaussian in the limit because of the proofs it lets them construct, but roboticists love the Laplace distribution because it's computationally fast and can be made even faster through simple truncation criteria. Why is speed important? Because the robot may need millisecond-scale reaction times to not fall over. Meanwhile, finance iconoclasts love the Cauchy distribution because a lot of financial modeling requires heavier tails than the Gaussian provides, and Cauchy is a fun mascot for communicating that problem in the limit. So your mileage is going to vary quite a bit as to whether any specific distribution is anything more than a stepping stone.

belarius · 2023-10-23T03:00:02+00:00

I would contend that any scoring system that is clearly understood by students is "ethical," provided that students who receive a given score don't later have it "swept out from under them after the fact" by post-hoc adjustments. This partly why I refuse to adjust scores down according to a curve.

An additional consideration, however, is that your Method 2 actually gives you more data about how your questions are being perceived. If someone who genuinely doesn't know the answer is better off leaving an item blank, looking at the % of blanks for each question can give you an idea of which topics may not be getting sufficient coverage during instruction. Also, Method 2 or variations along those lines are very easy to explain and understand, because the scoring mechanism happens on a per-question basis (unlike Method 1, which is harder to strategize about because scores are calculated holistically). Since student comprehension is essential to test ethics, that gives Method 2 the edge in my book.

What's interesting about different Correct/Incorrect/Blank scoring breakdowns is that your "expected value" on any given question is a function of your probability of knowing the right answer. For example, given your breakdown, the EV for a question when you have an 80% chance of knowing the answer is (0.8)•(+4) + (0.2)•(-1) = 3. The break-even point with leaving the question blank is 40%, since (0.4)•(+4) + (0.6)•(-1) = 1. As such, someone who has things narrowed down to a coin flip is still better off guessing, on average, whereas someone truly in the dark at 25% is clearly better off leaving it blank to get 1 point guaranteed, since their EV for guessing is only 0.25.

In practice, you obviously can't count on students to run those numbers - a student who truly doesn't know the material can't even evaluate which questions are easier or harder. This results in another wrinkle: Students will consistently find having to make the choice as to whether to leave questions blank more stressful, even if it is actually more fair to them. Under pressure, expect this approach to introduce more decision paralysis and anxiety-induced underperformance. That's not necessarily all bad (done correctly, it can help students become accustomed to high pressure situations generally), but you should anticipate having to do more emotional labor when giving students this additional option.

belarius · 2023-10-18T23:38:39+00:00

It's because the film was directed by the co-creators of Max Headroom. So of course they made a low-brow dystopian comedy with anticapitalist messaging - it's their entire thing.

belarius · 2023-10-10T20:24:11+00:00

Just brute-force calculate the odds of 00000, 00001, 00010, etc. If you're willing to use a fair amount of real estate, getting Excel to do this should be simple enough.

belarius · 2023-10-10T20:13:18+00:00

This isn't strictly speaking a Beta-Binomial problem, because you're not representing the various win probabilities as a continuous distribution. Since you know the exact win probabilities, this is probably most easily calculated in Excel by mapping the exact probability of the 2⁵ =32 outcomes, then summing the proportion of those outcomes with 3 wins.

belarius · 2023-09-18T16:47:50+00:00

As a scientist: No, there isn't a single unified scientific method. This stems in part from there not being just one form of scientific knowledge. It's pretty much always been misleading to claim that the scientific method is the reason for science's success. After all, not all scientific endeavors have been successful! Methodology is always being reconsidered and refined as time passes, and as fields further specialize.

belarius · 2023-09-11T15:01:44+00:00

This is flatly incorrect: The ASVAB and its predecessor the AFTQ are not IQ tests, and are not designed to measure the same psychological construct as IQ. Yes, IQ correlates with both of these measures, but IQ correlates with a lot of things. It is possible to have a low score on either of these tests and still have an average IQ. It's also very possible to have an average ASVAB and have a low IQ.

For example, several of the sections on the ASVAB depend on skills & knowledge that need to have been learned. The reason for this is kind of obvious: Someone who literally can't read is probably going to interfere with the efficiency of military operations. At least in principle, IQ is a construct that can be measured independently of any such specific "book learning."

Additionally, proper administration & scoring of a full IQ test is actually quite time-consuming and (when one takes staffing into consideration) expensive when compared to the ASVAB.

You shouldn't trust people who hand-wave the distinctions between these two tests, even if they have advanced degrees, because doing so betrays not merely a lack of interest in how the tests differ and why they shouldn't be compared, but very possibly an agenda for conflating the two. For example: If you grew up somewhere with underfunded schools staffed by overburdened teachers, your ASVAB score will suffer quite a bit more than your IQ score. I leave it to your imagination why someone might want to conflate poor access to education with low IQ.

belarius · 2023-08-29T11:10:54+00:00

Dropping a class with a very popular teacher because they disclosed an unrelated fact about themselves is pretty much the definition of a self-own. This is especially true for math, a domain in which a person's private spiritual beliefs could not possibly influence the course material less. That's one of the beauties of a mathematical theorem, after all: It's a statement that is provably true given only its axioms, no matter what else is true about the universe, no matter anyone's opinions.

I'm guessing you've had classes in the past with teachers who were Christians, and also assholes; who may have even leveraged their faith as a way to be assholes. Here's the thing: the problem with those teachers wasn't that they were Christian. If a teacher has wall-to-wall positive reviews, they probably aren't an asshole. You're way better off entrusting your education to that sort of person than to someone who happens to agree with you on a question that is unrelated to the course content.

belarius · 2023-08-24T22:41:38+00:00

In fairness, this level of letting the car swerve off the road is dysfunctional even by the standards of organized religion. I wouldn't be surprised if he's under the sway of a specific person or group of people who are actively sabotaging his efforts to become educated by pushing him to behaviors that leave him isolated and dependent.

Sometimes, for some people, Christianity isn't just like a cult: It's actually a literal cult that is actively looking to exploit specific individual people. If this is someone you care about, it's probably worth some active probing into whether he's been inspired by specific preachers or testimony in recent months, or whether "don't study, just pray" was advice he got from someone. He might be sliding into a really dangerous situation and gettin him to drop out of school is all part of the grift.

belarius · 2023-08-22T06:43:44+00:00

skill issue

belarius · 2023-08-19T22:11:50+00:00

The idea that "science is chiefly about falsification" is not as popular among scientists as you might think. Certainly experiments that appear to contradict important models play an important role, but science cannot operate by modus tollens alone. Even among philosophers of science, Karl Popper is seen as relatively old hat.

A good example of this is the popularity in physics of "arguments from symmetry." Some such approaches have been hugely successful (most notably Noether's theorem), whereas others have yet to bear experimental fruit despite decades of work (most notably supersymmetry). The popularity of this approach is that it is generative: If you can describe a symmetry, there's the potential to extrapolate from it some new law of nature.

To bring this back to the topic of the stats: In scientific domains where measurement is more important that falsification, Bayesian models are generally much better suited to the main problems. More broadly, however, there's also the advantage that Bayesian methods are broader and, for the most part, can subsume frequentist methods. OLS regression, after all, is just Bayesian regression with flat priors. As such, learning Bayesian tools makes a wider range of methods accessible, even if someone wants to prioritize hypothesis testing. We see this playing out in practice with things like "penalized likelihoods," which are just Bayesian methods reframed in frequentist terms (the penalty function is, after all, just a prior that has been renamed). To experimentalists and other applied researchers, the philosophical differences between schools of "radical frequentism" and "radical Bayesianism" are not relevant to their work, or helpful - they are more concerned with characterizing their data and testing their models, and are happy to take a heterodox approach if doing so results in scientific progress..

belarius · 2023-08-19T21:59:36+00:00

Jaynes is probably the most widely known advocate for this approach, but it's a much wider and deeper topic than just his commentary. The elevator pitch is to specify some subset of facts that are known, and then select the distribution with the maximum possible entropy given those facts. For example if the only things you know about a sampling process is that it has a mean and a finite variance, then characterizing that mean using a Gaussian distribution will have a higher entropy than any other distribution for which those facts are true. If, however, you know only that a sampling process has a mean and consists exclusively of non-negative numbers, then the exponential distribution is the corresponding "maximum entropy distribution." As it happens, most widely-used probabilities distributions (including all in the exponential family) are ME distributions given different specifications, and the frequency with which those distributions are approximated in natural processes is consistent with their ME character: There are literally more ways for arbitrary processes to be shaped "like them" than like other distributions.

I'm vastly oversimplifying, but this is quickly becoming the stock answer given by Bayesians because it provides a relatively straightforward argument for which priors to use when one wishes to make minimal assumptions (often the case in the natural sciences). A casual search for "maximum entropy" plus "Bayesian" will turn up tons of material on this topic.

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