The friendship paradox

Reading today about illusory superiority to improve the Wikipedia article, I came across something tangential but intellectually delightful.
Most people have fewer friends than their friends (on average) have.
When I first read it, it sounded impossible, but it’s a practically inevitable fact.
It’s not specifically about friendship, but a mathematical fact about any relation which is symmetrical [...]

The biased search for confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the bias to seek for, interpret and remember information in ways that confirm our existing beliefs rather than genuinely test them. In general, it’s an irrational preference for information that matches our expectations. This is one of the first biases I learned about, but recently I’ve been reading up on it in [...]

World Health Organisation condemns homeopathy

Joyful news today on the BBC about a successful campaign for the charity Sense About Science. They asked the World Health Organisation to comment on the use of homeopathic treatment for diseases like HIV, malaria, TB and infant diarrhoea, and various WHO authorities have responded, stating in very clear terms that these conditions need to [...]

A massive intellectual wiki-boner

This is a navel-gazing post about an exercise in vanity searching, mainly set down as a not to myself. There: you were warned.
I did some testing using the Wikipedia stats tool to investigate how many people read my contributions.
I assume that people rarely read entire WP articles, but usually skim them. So I can’t include [...]