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Strands #211 “Words with weight” 💡🔵🔵🔵 🔵🔵🔵🔵 🟡

Might be my first one with just a single hint!

I might have made this up as well, but I have a very distinct memory of basically suddenly becoming conscious at around being 3 years old. I woke up from a nap and for a couple hours or possibly days, I wasn’t sure whether I was dreaming or the world around me was actually real. After a couple of days of waking up in the same environment, I eventually accepted this to be reality. I of course don’t remember everything from this point on in my life, but it really felt like the first time I was able to explicitly think about stuff.

I didn’t see the pattern either and had to look it up. Apparently, you can rewrite 1 + 1/(1+2) + 1/(1+2+3)+… as 2(1 - 1/2 + 1/2 - 1/3 +…+1/n - 1/(n + 1)) = 2(1 - 1/(n + 1))

From there, the limit of 2 is obvious, but I guess you just have to build up intuition with infinite sums to see the reformulation.

The t-distribution approaches the normal distribution with increasing degrees of freedom. It is certainly more relevant in for example hypothesis testing, since t-Tests (variance is estimated from the data) is much more common than z-tests (variance is treated as fixed and coming from a normal distribution).

In all of statistics or probability theory, the normal theory is however way more influential.

Nonetheless, it’s a cool bit of history where modern statistics got its roots. As a lover of both statistics and guinness, i approve!🍻

First of all, I agree that it would be great if a drug/medicinal procedure would cure a certain condition in each and every patient or at least the vast majority of them. Sadly, that is rarely the case, but that by no means is equivalent to say that when this drug or procedure helps, it’s mostly or entirely due to the placebo effect. That’s the whole reason we need randomised controlled trials as their might be a significant difference in treatments that only becomes clearly observable once a certain sample size is reached and possible confounding variables are controlled for (usually by randomisation). The human body and many of diseases are incredibly complex so it’s naive to assume we could forsee each and every possible influence on a drugs efficacy and therefore determine without error how a patient will react to it.

While there is quite a big group of non-responders when it comes to psychotherapy, it is, on average, an effective treatment clearly proven by a vast body of research. There is still much more to find out, but putting it on the same level as not consuming gluten is in no way defensible.

Now to get back to chiropractics, I don’t know too much about it, but I thought it’s mostly short term pressure and pain relief, which however rarely combats the underlying issues. Can still be helpful, of course, as pain relief helps with getting more physical activity, as this is often a culprit for example back problems.

That said, I personally wouldn’t let anyone touch my spine or neck like some chiropractors do. I’d be too scared of irreparable nerve damage.

more dollars flying around -> economic stimulus -> inflation.

This is a logic that seemed intuitive to me as well for a long time. However, it doesn’t make much sense to me anymore when I think about money as simply a representation of wealth or value.

Imagine somebody spending their time and Know-how to build a chair which can be sold at 50$ more than what the original materials are worth. Through their work, they created wealth. The still unchanged amount of money does not accurately represent the currently avaliable wealth anymore and in order to still be redistributed among all goods and services relative to their worth, prices would need to drop (deflation). Now of course, the value of a chair and other goods generally declines over time such that wealth can also disappear, which will cause inflation if it happens excessively. If the government decides to stimulate the economy, ergo creating new money and distributing it, there will still be no inflation if this money is in some way or form used to create the same or more wealth than the equivalent of the newly introduced money. This can easily happen when there are bottlenecks in the current economic situation such as high unemployment or underdeveloped infrastructure.

If of course the new money isn’t used to create more wealth, either because it is pocketed by some entities or because there simply are no people or natural resources available, it will lead to inflation.

I don’t like this cover particularly much, but it definitely stays true to the feel of the original.

“Bye bye love” is a pretty funny one by S&G as the lyrics are all about heartache bordering full on depression, but people love to clap along to the upbeat melody.

Not trying to defend the decision, but as far as I know, the reasoning is that if you charge significantly less than you could, it might be because you have other undisclosed agreements with the tenants, like them doing some extra chores for you, repairing the flat or something else. This way, you could avoid a lot of taxes. The sentence also doesn’t seem to be a fine in the narrow sense, but rather a demand of additional taxes. If I’m not mistaken, it’s perfectly legal to charge very little for a flat, but you still have to pay taxes as if you would have rented it out for a regular price.

I think quite some people heard of the concept of different kinds of infinity, but don’t know much about how these are defined. That’s why this meme should be inverted, as thinking the infinities described here are the same size is the intuitive answer when you either know nothing or quite something about the definition whereas knowing just a little bit can easily lead you to the wrong answer.

As the described in the wikipedia article in the top level comment, the thing that matters is whether you can construct a mapping (or more precisely, a bijection) from one set to the other. If so, the sets/infinities are of the same “size”.

You can add the Lakers to that. I guess it’s natural for scoring to distribute over the quarters since being behind incentivizes playing your best players for longer and hustle in general. In addition, if you know your opponents are slow starters for example, part of the game plan might be trying to exploit that which would make it a self enforcing feedback loop.

I think the text tries to make the point that it doesn’t work not because but despite him being black. The argument Perry and others make in this case is not one in the form of material benefits but rather moral ones. A member of a marginalized group makes it big, which is supposed to inspire others from this group. The point is that this form of trickle down economics works just as badly as the “regular” one, which is hardly at all.

Die Sendung hat mir wirklich gut gefallen! Mit der klar links-grünen Ausrichtung wählt sich das Publikum zwar vermutlich bereits schon so aus, das viele Argumente offene Türen einrennen, aber der Abschnitt zur Klima-WG hat sicher auch Potenzial als Short oder Tiktok.

Um die von Frau Paus angesprochenen 30-60jährigen Wissenschaftskritiker/Klimaskeptiker anzusprechen funktioniert das vielleicht nicht direkt, aber womöglich wird die Analogie an anderen Stellen dann wieder aufgegriffen.