Essays and thoughts without a home
I've started a new blog on Substack, Kaleidoscope Mind, for writing about whatever topics I'm interested in. The website you're reading now hosts an archive of a few things I've written previously, but newer content will be published over there.
1. In the 1980s, 75% of airline accidents happened while the captain (the more senior of the two pilots) was flying the plane. An investigation found this happened because (junior) first officers didn't feel comfortable pointing out concerns when a superior was in charge; after airlines adopted a protocol with explicit steps on how to raise and confirm acknowledgement of an issue, captains' share of accidents fell back to 50%. [...]
Around the start of this year's NCAA tournament, I started wondering: do different offenses have different opponent elasticities? What I mean by opponent elasticity is how much worse an offense gets when they play a better defense. [...]
1. The number of licensed geriatrics doctors in the US fell by 25% from 1996-2010, even as the population aged. Generalists can provide elder care, of course, but at last one RCT showed that patients that see a geriatric specialist have better outcomes than those seeing a generalist. [...]
1. Commercial and consumer toilet paper have different specifications and separate supply chains, which led to the early-pandemic shortages. The same is true of a wide range of perhaps surprising products, such as bananas: restaurants and cafeterias order smaller, loose bananas, whereas supermarkets order larger bananas in bunches. [...]
You know the adage: you can't judge a book by its cover. But let's be real, I do it all the time, and you probably do too. You can think of books that confirm or disprove the old saying, but advancements in AI, image recognition algorithms, and crowdsourcing platforms allow us to go beyond anecdotes and analyze this in more detail: can you judge a book by its cover after all?
You've probably heard of the hot hand fallacy. In many areas, but most famously in basketball, people have long believed in the hot hand: a player who made their last couple shots was more likely to make the next one as well. But a famous 1985 study, analyzing some in-game NBA data and some experiments with Cornell basketball players, found that there was no correlation between previous shots and the outcome of the next one -- there was no hot hand.
1. Until 2011(!), vehicles were only required to use average male-proportioned crash test dummies; when female-like dummies were added, many cars' safety ratings fell. [...]