kaptainkayak

Me and my girlfriend listened to hours of freakonomics on a recent road trip. We got hooked!

I remember one episode where you said that you don't fully believe the Stanford prison experiment, that the outcome of a study depends on who administers the study. Have you ever thought about administering a study while pretending to be a psychologist to test this?

Sorry, I phrased that weirdly. In the episode, Levitt said that he believed that the administrators of the Stanford prison experiment had an effect on it, and that if other people had been administering it, and looking for a different outcome, then it could have gone differently.

Levitt apparently tried to replicate other experiments run by, say, psychologists, but couldn't make the same conclusion.

Experimenting with Buffon's needle problem is not really a good idea. The rate of convergence is so slow that even after 10 000 trials, you wouldn't have a stronger case of the average number of hits being 3, pi, e*7/6, or any other number between 2.9 and 3.35.

edit: If you make the lines much closer than the width of the needle, you can get much better rates of convergence to pi, but in order to make sense of it, you have to already know the values of trigonometric functions, which makes this whole thing a bit circular.

See: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~cgates/PERSI/papers/needle.pdf

What does that matter? Being gilded means one person thought it was important enough to spend $5. It could mean that it was a reasonable question, or it could mean that five extremely sexist people agreed with the message.

I could argue that their response received almost twice as many upvotes as the question, and was gilded twice to boot, which would be equally fallacious...

Putting merit in an argument because of popularity is a fallacy. The important question is whether it stands up to reason.