Stephen Colbert, Mitch Landrieu, Ashley Madison, Probability , Leadership, Logic

The Late, Great, Stephen Colbert

Joel Lovell | GQ | 17th August 2015

Beyond the Colbert Show and before the Late Show. Portrait of the comedian as a genius, an obsessive, and a Catholic. "I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people. I was raised in a Catholic tradition. I'll start there. That's my context for my existence, is that I am here to know God, love God, serve God, that we might be happy with each other in this world and with Him in the next—the catechism" (5,900 words)

A Matter Of Black Lives

Jeffrey Goldberg | Atlantic | 19th August 2015

Conversation with Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, during a visit to the Louisiana State prison at Angola. “This place will bring you to your knees. I don’t understand why it’s okay in America for us to leave so many of our citizens basically dead. Why do we allow our citizens to kill each other as if it’s the cost of doing business? We have basically given up on our African American boys. I’d be a cold son of a bitch if I ignored it" (8,300 words)

Early Notes On The Ashley Madison Hack

John Herrman | Awl | 19th August 2015

"This feels like a momentous event. This hack has the potential to alter anyone’s relationship with the devices and apps and services they use every day. Here were people expecting the highest level of privacy that the commercial web could offer, as they conducted business they likely wanted to keep between two people. It’s a powerful reminder of the impossibility of perfect privacy. Welcome to the future, I guess!" (918 words)

Science Isn’t Broken

Christie Aschwanden | FiveThirtyEight | 19th August 2015

Most of the kerfuffle surrounding non-reproducible results in scientific journals reduces to questions of probability. The current threshold for statistical significance is a probability of 5%. If your result has less than a 5% chance of arising from mere coincidence — p < 0.05 — you have a chance of getting published. You want to get published. So you fiddle with the results. “Everybody has p-hacked at least a little bit” (4,000 words) Politics Is All About Leadership ** Janan Ganesh | Financial Times | 18th August 2015 | | Read with 1Pass Leadership is to politics what productivity is to economics: not quite the only thing that matters, but almost. We are taught to read impersonal forces and historic inevitability into every election result. But a party with a good leader can afford to get everything else wrong; and yet it probably will not, since most other variables - policy, strategy, organisation - flow from the leader. Democracy is presidential, even when it pretends otherwise (778 words) ** Common Knowledge And Aumann’s Agreement Theorem () ** Scott Aaronson | Shtetl-Optimized | 14th August 2015 On the difference between common knowledge and public knowledge. Two people coming back from a date know perfectly well that the reason they’re going up to the same apartment has nothing to do with "having a coffee". Each knows that the other person knows that. But they want plausible deniability in case something doesn't go quite right. "So long as nothing was ever openly said, there’s no agreement to break" (6,000 words) ** Video of the day: How To Make A Clock () What to expect: This part is just about making the screws to hold the bezel. Every second is a joy. Full screen if you can (9'36") ** Thought for the day People soon get tired of things that aren't boring Haruki Murakami () ** Follow on Twitter () Copyright © *|CURRENT_YEAR|* *|LIST:COMPANY|*, All rights reserved. *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|*