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Extremely Weak Cryptography: Rot13 for Numbers
The idea of rot13 is to obscure text, for example, to prevent spoilers. It's not meant to be cryptographically secure but simply to make sure that only people who are sure they want to read something will read it. "It's handy when coordinating by text message when one or both parties are about to get... »
Misleading Means: On Drugs and Discrimination
How do you estimate the prevalence of HIV among drug addicts? In a perfect (though somewhat Orwellian) world you'd have a giant list of all drug users, and you'd randomly select a subset of them to test for HIV. Alas, the world is messy, and we're left to less rigorous methods, for example... »
Yes, You Are (Maybe) Overconfident
218 of you took our calibration quiz, not counting the 10% of submissions that had to be thrown out for not being complete or giving ranges with the min greater than the max or other sanity check failures. (Here's the raw data.) The bad news is that you're terrible at making 90% confidence... »
Are You Overconfident?
We shall now find out if Messy Matters readers are smarter than Mechanical Turkers. For each of the questions below, provide a numerical range that you are 90% sure contains the correct answer. In particular, if you have “no idea” then give a very wide range; and if you happen to be... »
Prediction Without Markets
In the 2008 Summer Olympics Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.69 seconds, earning the gold medal and garnering the international attention that comes with being the "fastest man in the world." While Bolt became a household name, his competitors didn't fare nearly as well: far fewer people... »
