Paper by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University made the news last week. "Dissolving the Fermi Paradox", on Arxiv (and therefore…

Note An earlier version of this post was accidentally sent out in unedited form. My enemies caused me to hit the wrong button. Subscribers: apologies for the near duplicate email.…

I stole today's title from David Papineau's essay "Thomas Bayes and the crisis in science", which many readers sent in. When I was in grad school bad in the early…

As we learned before, hate facts "are true statements about reality that our elites demand remain occult and unuttered." The problem is that hate facts will routinely pop up in…

https://twitter.com/drewconway/status/1010137695664951297 This meme which heads today's post (see discussion under this tweet a modification of an original cartoon) expresses the true distinction between statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Which…

In the late spring of 1988, Senator Tim Wirth from Colorado (guess his party) called the Weather Bureau and asked what historically was the hottest day of the year in…