I am working on a new book called You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. It’s a data-driven exploration of progress (or not) in public opinion and civil rights. I posted the first two chapters as an Early Access edition on LeanPub (a platform for posting work in progress like this): https://leanpub.com/ywcn If you would like to check it out, the “Free Sample” has just the first chapter. If you sign up with an email address,... Read More Read More The post New Book! appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.

The online version of Think Java now features interactive widgets that run the code examples in the browser. For readers, it means you can try out the examples, modify them, and test your code. And for us it means we can publish an interactive version of the book without providing servers. The widgets use java-runner, an in-browser Java editor and interpreter developed by Think Java co-author Chris Mayfield. java-runner implements a subset of Java with the features needed for most... Read More Read More The post Think Java, but interactive appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.

Here’s a probability puzzle from a TED-Ed video called Can you solve the frog riddle? by Derek Abbott. It came up recently in this Reddit thread: You’re stranded in a rainforest after accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom. To survive the poison, you need to lick a certain species of frog. Only female frogs produce the antidote. Male and female frogs occur in equal numbers and look identical, but male frogs have a distinctive croak. You see one frog alone on... Read More Read More The post The Frog Puzzle appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.

Yesterday I presented a talk at ODSC East 2026, called “Counterfactual Analysis with Bayesian Models: What Drives the Life Expectancy Gap?” Here’s the abstract Across nearly every country in the world, women live longer than men—but the size of this gap varies from about two years in some countries to more than twelve in others. What explains these differences, and how much of the gap can be closed? In this talk, I present a practical approach to counterfactual analysis using... Read More Read More The post Planning for your midlife crisis appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.

In a previous article, I claimed that Young adults are not very happy. Now the World Happiness Report 2026 has confirmed that young people in North America and Western Europe are less happy than they were fifteen years ago, and less happy than previous generations. In this article, we’ll look at results from three related questions in the General Social Survey (GSS): As we’ll see, young adults in the United States have a more negative outlook than previous generations: they... Read More Read More The post Trust and Well-Being appeared first on Probably Overthinking It.