Let's hope they at least go for integers. Otherwise you're in real trouble... Logic really should be taught in school, but it is not in the best interest of the teachers to create an army of little lawyers that will then apply this new skill to each and every decision made by the school. Schools prefer obedient little children, not children that think for themselves.
Why does this site show up so much on HN? It seems to be the same few pop-science topics repeated and stretched out in new ways with questionable studies and whatever flimsy thing they can use to grab attention with a new headline.
If you click on the domain name to the right of the link you'll see that the site is being submitted by a few HN regulars. All it takes from there is 3 additional upvotes. Similar patterns exist around techcrunch, the wall street journal, the economist and many other domains that appear on HN with clockwork regularity. Pretty much every article on TC for instance is submitted within a very short time from the time they press 'publish' on TC and many HN'ers will submit these articles. It's more or less the exact reason why HN exists, to share links related to certain subjects and websites that cater to those subjects will see a great deal of exposure.
Most of the comparable sites are penalized * on HN, but Nautilus isn't because we had the impression that their articles were of higher quality. Wrong?
* This penalty doesn't prevent stories from making the front page, it just requires more votes to do it, or a moderator to waive the penalty. It's the solution we came up with for media websites that put out reams of fluff but also the occasional solid story.
Well, I'm not sure about other articles, but this one is rather bad (for example, as noted in some comments here, statistical examples are fundamentally wrong, and they are being used to support a substantial part of the argument).
They lost me at the basketball story. The point would be valid if the scoring baskets were uncorrelated events, but they're not - a player's physical and mental state on the day of play will be similar for all of them, and different than on another day.
Then immediately after he talks about the probability of dice rolls, without realizing that rolling a 7 is much more likely than rolling a 2 if you're using a pair of dice.
And immediately follows that with an example where "four hits is no less likely to happen by chance than two hits and two misses or three hits and one miss" (perhaps if he said "two hits followed by two misses", but that would make no sense in the context, so I think he meant exactly what he wrote, i.e. that having 2 hits out of 4 is as likely as having 4 out of 4.)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 35.2 ms ] threadLook over there! my brain runs away giggling
It's always struck me that it's odd we don't teach kids how to think. Basic literacy and numeracy, no problems. Basic thinkacy? Unthinkable.
* This penalty doesn't prevent stories from making the front page, it just requires more votes to do it, or a moderator to waive the penalty. It's the solution we came up with for media websites that put out reams of fluff but also the occasional solid story.
Then immediately after he talks about the probability of dice rolls, without realizing that rolling a 7 is much more likely than rolling a 2 if you're using a pair of dice.
Honestly, this is just ridiculous.