A lot of financial thinking and intuition attempts to phrase decisions and choices in terms of claimed returns or in terms of expected values. For example: An ultra greedy gambler may pick the highest claimed winning payoff, independent of win or success probabilities. A greedy gambler may pick the highest […]

The (now falsified) Jacobian conjecture was a well known conjecture expressing the hope that a family of functions had nice properties. In July 2026 Levent Alpöge exhibited a simple counter-example that he said was found by Claude Fable 5. Fields medalist Terence Tao wrote on this result try to relate […]

Win Vector’s Dr. Nina Zumel has an exciting new article to share: Who’s the Best Batter? Estimating Probabilities from Unevenly Collected Data. It is a technical demonstration on how what one observes (outcomes, frequencies, and so on) differ from what we want to know (effectiveness, probabilities, and so on). In […]

I’ve been worrying a bit over the philosophy of creation and dissemination in the era of LLMs (large language models). I feel we are overly impressed with the byproduct or even the bycatch. LLMs do complete some tasks, write code, and produce superficially convincing texts. In my opinion, this is […]