Math with Bad Drawings
Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality
Ben Orlin
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8 quotes
Chapter 1
- Creativity is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.Feb 13 2023 9:45AM
part 2
- Yet as we’ve seen, and shall see many times again, that’s not a bad thing. Restrictions birth creativity. The laws on what shapes can’t do come packaged with case studies illuminating what they can. In design projects ranging from sturdy buildings to useful paper to planet-destroying space stations, geometry inspires even as it constrains.Feb 13 2023 9:49AM
Chapter 16
- Lotteries, by contrast, are simple. Plain outcomes. Clear probabilities. A social scientist’s dream. You see, the behavioral economist is not here to play, just to watch you play.May 16 2023 9:49AM
14. Weird Insurance
- Our ignorance of fate can force us to collaborate against it. We have built a democracy from our uncertainty—and new knowledge threatens that balance, as sure as flood or fire.May 16 2023 9:56AM
15. How to Break the Economy with a Single Pair of Dice
- Independence irons out extremes; dependence amplifies them.May 16 2023 9:57AM
Chapter 24
- True negatives are less fun. They’re like thinking you’d tidied the house and done the laundry, only to realize that, nope, that was just in your head. You’d rather know the truth, but you wish it were otherwise.Dec 1 2023 8:04AM
- By contrast, false negatives are haunting. They’re like looking for your lost keys in the right place but somehow not seeing them. You’ll never know how close you were.Dec 1 2023 8:04AM
- Last is the scariest category of all: false positives. They are, in a word, “flukes,” falsehoods that, on a good hair day, pass for truths.Dec 1 2023 8:05AM