Predictions for 2020

In the spirit of Slate Star Codex, I will be offering some of my predictions for 2020. In January 2021 I will return to these and grade them. The predictions fall into three categories: US Politics (there are many of these since it's an election year), Personal (predictions about what I will do next year), …

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Pete’s problem

It's not every day that a presidential candidate stumps you with a really interesting math problem, but that's exactly what Pete Buttigieg did on Tuesday when he sent out the following email to his supporters: Pete’s Innovation Team handles data, engineering, and analytics responsibilities for the campaign, so you might not be shocked to learn …

Beyond the mean, median, and mode

[Thanks to Drake Thomas and Mike Winston for discussion.] In third grade math class, my teacher Ms. Potter taught my class about the mean, median, and mode of a list of numbers. What united these numbers, Ms. Potter told us, was that they were measures of central tendency: numbers that represented, in some sense, the …