Coronavirus conspiracies and moral matrices
Lately I have seen quite a few posts on social media that can be paraphrased as follows: [Insert villain] is destroying our society by...
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Echo chambers and political polarization
This is part 2 of a series on social media and its effects on society. You can find part 1 here. Also, if you enjoy these posts. Please...
This one chart showing mortality risk will blow your mind
You know how some people like to downplay this whole pandemic situation by pointing out that most of the people who die are old and/or...
Commencement and Confirmation Bias at Hillsdale College
I didn’t want to write this post. In this blog, I have tried to steer clear of criticizing particular people and institutions and to...
Why is the death rate lower and will it stay that way?
On July 9th, the Atlantic published an article entitled COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining? In this article they...
How to lie with percentages
Statistics are great. They can tell us tons of useful stuff about what is happening in the world. They can tell us lots of fun facts....
About those surges of COVID patients...
Back in March when the world shut down, hospitals began bracing themselves for an uncertain future. There were stories of hospitals in...
Going viral: How (dis)information is like a virus
What is it that allows an infectious disease to cause an epidemic or even a pandemic? It turns out that you need a transmissible entity...
COVID-19 Testing and Goodhart's Law
“Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would...
Racial inequality and dynamical systems
I was on Facebook the other day, when I saw a shared post that said the following: “No white person alive today ever owned a slave. No...
Is there evidence of discrimination in policing data?
In the last post, I discussed the trade-offs between false negatives (guilty people who are treated as innocent) and false positives...
What do classification algorithms reveal about whether black lives matter?
Classifications problems are hard. There is no way around it. We face them every day. The reality is that mistakes are inevitable and the...
How can you measure which lives matter?
Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. All lives matter. When I first started hearing statements like these I was admittedly a bit...
Are stereotypes grounded in fact?
In the last post, I discussed the “mere-exposure” effect and how neutral and positive exposure has been shown to decrease prejudice and...
Familiarity breeds… acceptance?
In the last post, I highlighted the fact that social networks are assortative, meaning that we tend to form connections to people who are...
Assortativity, chimera states and empathy
Back in early 2016 when the primaries were in full swing, I was sitting around the lunch table with colleagues, when the conversation...
Inflection point
Both the coronavirus and the issues brought to light by the protests surrounding Floyd's death warrant our attention.
My normal approach is useless here
In the last week, I have tried to sit down and write about what is happening in the world repeatedly, but I have been unable to put...
All models are wrong, but this time the models got it right
Today, the death toll for COVID-19 in the US crossed 100000, a staggering number that makes this virus the third leading cause of death...
Your social network is larger than you think
In case anyone was wondering why this blog went from having a few posts per week to nothing for a couple of weeks, my family and I just...
Seeing 2020:
Current events through a mathematical lens
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