Viewing profile — gbhn

There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed. The page you reference indexes …

A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract. The reality of ev…

Ultimately wouldn't these rates be set politically? As in, there'd be one politician who says "raise the tax and do this" and another who says "lower the tax and stop doing that" a…

Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex…

That's kind of the thing that makes APIs possible, right? It sounds to me like "what if programming were done in a completely flat global namespace in which abstractions, encapsula…

I think the theory is "there are few enough we didn't notice." There's other weird effects going on -- some countries that look really really similar have vastly different experien…

See also Krypto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypto_(game) Some friends and I were hooked on this game in college. We eventually wrote a program to solve particularly tough hands.…

From the discussion on this I've read, I think a good direction would be to consider statistical tests like this as simply not "publishable" at all the way we currently think of it…

Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the i…

A local coin/stamp person was completely uninterested in my old stamps from like 35 years ago. I think the shrinking number of collectors is outstripping the number of collections …

By "open standards people" I mean "people who prefer open standards". Nothing more sinister than that. :-) (I am one, BTW) This is already a very small subset of the population -- …

Fatalities per passenger mile is a good metric for passengers, but for the FAA, I think crashes per vehicle mile is a better target. That is, the plane isn't inherently 100x safer …

I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to infinite fine splitting of …

The authors' point seems to be "if you ask people questions whose real answers correspond to informal statistical judgments, then they will give the right answers." This isn't real…

The point of the article is that your intuition is incorrect. By inhibiting zipper merging you are forcing congestion backward, and leaving carrying capacity of the road unutilized…

Did anyone else find the variance illustration completely baffling? It's got little to do with an intuitive feel for the variation in outcome for a random variable

The history is that 'fake news" was used to refer to fabricated stories. Following it's surge in.popularity following the 2016 election, Trump realized the term was catchy and clai…

I learn the opposite from NYC: if the city is successful enough to draw a lot of real estate development, the result will be even higher prices. This more closely matches the actua…

Interesting! Do you have a book on the subject to recommend?

google.com/search?q=human+echolocation brings up a ton of related stuff. The thing is "what do you type into the search engine." I, for one, would never think to type in any of pro…

I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers. For instance, the one they call "Hooters" is described as "A ge…

You'd appreciate sandstorm.io

I listen to the show a fair amount. It tends toward the "human interest" side rather than "expert interview" side. In other words, the format doesn't seem to me to have a lot of in…

Sure, but a main point of a crypto currency is realizing there's no reason to back a monetary currency with anything. It's just a shared hallucination. There's no rational reason a…

I read it as saying something a little more subtle, which is that there is a lot of uncertainty in a couple of our critical estimates, and given that uncertainty what we see (no ot…