Category: Intuition

The unexpected power of baby math: Adults still think about numbers like kids

January 28, 2015

“A new study has found new evidence that educated adults retain traces of their innate sense of numbers from childhood — and that it’s more powerful than many scientists think. The findings could contribute to the development of methods to more effectively educate or treat children with learning disabilities and people with brain injuries.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140122134231.htm

The problem of really big numbers

January 28, 2015

“If you were around during the last technology boom and bust cycle of the early 2000s you were likely exposed to the concept of really big numbers. Countless business plans for all manner of ill-conceived ideas began with “If just 0.00001% of all internet users visit our site…” and used that as the core foundation of their revenue model. While it all seemed logical at the time, the logic of really big numbers had two fundamental failings.”

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/the-problem-of-really-big-numbers/

4th Down Bot. Live analysis of every N.F.L. fourth-down decision

January 28, 2015

4th Down Bot copyThis is a clever program that does an analysis of every 4th down play in every professional football game. It determines based on mathematical expected value whether teams should go for it, punt, or kick a field goal. It breaks down the math behind its decision making. What’s interesting is how often the mathematical decisions are not the ones followed by the people on the field. Who is right in a case like this? What happens when the “common sense” approach is different from the mathematically “true” approach?

http://nyt4thdownbot.com/

How Oregon Coach Chip Kelly Can Spark ‘Moneyball’ Revolution In NFL

January 28, 2015

“Those fourth down calls epitomize Kelly’s aggressiveness but what the average football fan doesn’t realize is that Chip’s play-calls (the fourth down tries, fake punts, two-point conversions, etc.) are almost always the correct mathematical decision. Like Paul DePodesta and Billy Beane did in baseball, Kelly’s genius comes from exploiting arithmetic that other coaches are too naïve to acknowledge.”

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/men-action/201211/how-oregon-coach-chip-kelly-can-spark-moneyball-revolution-nfl

Using Math to analyze baseball. Sabermetrics

January 28, 2015

Popularized in the book and later on the movie, Moneyball, Sabermetrics is “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.’ Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as ‘which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team’s offense?’ or ‘How many home runs will Ken Griffey hit next year?’ It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as ‘Who is your favorite player?’ or ‘That was a great game.'” -Bill James.

Sabermetrics has caused tremendous controversy among sports analysts and enthusiasts because of the positions they take on questions such as: How do we reconcile mathematical knowledge that contradicts our intuition? What if our eyes tell us one truth and our numbers tell us a different one?

Some people complain that the reliance on numbers takes away from the “magic and mystery of the game.”

The baseball organizations themselves have adopted the data driven approach to analyzing players. With the success of the Oakland Athletics (a team that was an early adopter of the mathematical methods known as Sabermetrics) and later on the Boston Red Sox, most if not all teams use these analytical methods.

The first link below is an introduction to the basics of sabermetrics and below that are two disagreeing with its use.

http://sabr.org/sabermetrics

http://www.hardballtimes.com/death-to-sabermetrics/

http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/sabermetrics-moneyball-stat-geeks-are-ruining-sports-092211

A Natural Log: Our Innate Sense of Numbers is Logarithmic, Not Linear

January 27, 2015

“We humans seem to be born with a number line in our head. But a May 30 study in Science suggests it may look less like an evenly segmented ruler and more like a logarithmic slide rule on which the distance between two numbers represents their ratio (when ­di­vided) rather than their difference (when subtracted).”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-natural-log/

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

January 27, 2015

This is one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. A work of tremendous scope and implications. Kahneman is a genius in the field of economics and psychology.

From the amazon description of the book:

“Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.”

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1422319768&sr=8-1

Book: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

January 27, 2015

“In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within.

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?”

-Amazon Review

http://www.amazon.com/Blink-The-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1422319653&sr=8-1

Across America, whites are biased and they don’t even know it

January 22, 2015

“Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they’re not aware of or able to control it. It’s a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases — which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences — are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/08/across-america-whites-are-biased-and-they-dont-even-know-it/?tid=sm_fb

The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men

January 22, 2015

“You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you can’t control these split-second reactions. As the milliseconds are being tallied up, you know the tale they’ll tell: When negative words and black faces are paired together, you’re a better, faster categorizer. Which suggests that racially biased messages from the culture around you have shaped the very wiring of your brain.”

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/science-of-racism-prejudice