John Allen Paulos: Avoiding Innumeracy
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Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: John Allen Paulos on Numbers, Narratives, and Numeracy
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people find the subject intimidating, if not off-putting. John Allen Paulos has long been working to make mathematics…
John Allen Paulos: Stories vs. Statistics
More on John Allen Paulos’s new book here.
John Allen Paulos: Who’s Counting? Uniting Numbers and Narratives
John Allen Paulos interviewed by Christopher G. Moore
John Allen Paulos: We’re Reading the Coronavirus Numbers Wrong
John Allen Paulos in the New York Times: Numbers have a certain mystique: They seem precise, exact, sometimes even beyond doubt. But outside the field of pure mathematics, this reputation rarely is deserved. And when it comes to the coronavirus epidemic, buying into that can be downright dangerous. Naturally, everyone wants to know how deadly…
John Allen Paulos: A Few Reflections on “A Numerate Life”
John Allen Paulos in Scholar Commons at the University of South Florida website: Lawyers, journalists, economists, novelists, and “public intellectuals,” among others, are all frequent commentators on both contemporary social issues and our personal lives and predicaments. And as someone who majored at one time or another in English, classics, and philosophy, I say rightly…
Book review of A Numerate Life by John Allen Paulos
Dilip D'Souza in LiveMint: You might pick the book up anticipating an autobiography, but A Numerate Life is not one in the sense you probably understand that word. Not least because Paulos nurses a “scepticism about the biographical enterprise” and that’s partly why this book’s “progression will be episodic and non-linear”. But through it all,…
John Allen Paulos finally confesses: “The Bush presidency was my fault”
John Allen Paulos in Salon: An example of an extremely significant, decidedly unintended result of a relatively tiny event can be nightmarish. This one is, at least for me. It concerns the role I played in getting George W. Bush elected president in 2000. That I was the butterfly whose fluttering cascaded into Bush’s election…
Neil deGrasse Tyson interrogates John Allen Paulos on Twitter
More here.
John Allen Paulos on Health, Wealth and Happiness
From ABC News: First wealth. A recently released study says that the inequality in wealth throughout the world is extreme and growing more so. The report by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University paints an informative picture of the world’s wealth distribution as of 2000, the last year for…
An almost psychotically optimistic hope: Paulos on Penrose
John Allen Paulos reviews The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose, in his monthly Who’s Counting column at ABC News: The first 400 pages of “The Road to Reality” sketch the mathematics needed to understand the physics of the following 700 pages. Like many mathematicians, Penrose…
John Allen Paulos on the Larry Summers Controversy
In his monthly column at ABC News, John Allen Paulos sheds light on Harvard University president Larry Summers’s remarks about the possibility of innate differences between men and women accounting for the under-representation of women in the mathematical sciences in the academy: …on the math SATs, the average boy’s score is slightly higher than the…
Common Knowledge, a Parable
by John Allen Paulos A bit of information is common knowledge among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is much more than “mutual knowledge,” which requires only that the parties know a particular bit…
The Prevalence of Recursive Reckoning in Everyday Life
by John Allen Paulos The stock market, social media, award contests, product reviews, beauty contests, social media, fashion styles, job applications, award contests, product reviews, and even elections, don’t seem to belong in the same crowded sentence. What do they have in common? Before I get there, a couple of abstract analogues to pave the way.…
Bullshit and Cons: Alberto Brandolini and Mark Twain Issue a Warning About Trump
by John Allen Paulos As atrocious, appalling, and abhorrent as Trump’s countless spirit-sapping outrages are, I’d like to move a little beyond adumbrating them and instead suggest a few ideas that make them even more pernicious than they first seem. Underlying the outrages are his cruelty, narcissism and ignorance, made worse by the fact that…
A Simple Model of Lazy Voters and Partisan Politics
by John Allen Paulos Voters are lazy and often pay little or no attention to numbers and facts presumably relevant to their concerns. I remember initiating a discussion of the housing crisis in the US. I mentioned a headline I claimed to have just read, which stated “Experts Fear Annual Housing Costs in the U.S. –…
Newcomb’s Paradox Revisited
by John Allen Paulos Despite the fact that Newcomb’s paradox was discovered in 1960, I’ve been prompted to discuss it now for three reasons, the first being its inherent interest and counterintuitive conclusions. The two other factors are topical. One is a scheme put forth by Elon Musk in which he offered a small prize…
Chaos, Horseshoes, and Us
by John Allen Paulos When studying a technical field there is a strong temptation, especially among those without a scientific background, to apply its findings in areas where they may not make sense or are merely metaphors. (“Merely” is perhaps unnecessarily dismissive since much of our understanding of these fields is metaphorical.) Quantum mechanics and…
The Statistical Margin of Error – Evaluating the Polls, Weighing the Cows
by John Allen Paulos Every time I read or watch anything about the election I hear some variant of the phrase “margin of error.” My mathematically attuned ears perk up, but usually it’s just a slightly pretentious way of saying the election is very close or else that it’s not very close. Schmargin of error…