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Nov 15, 2023·edited Nov 15, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer

Thank you for advocacy on behalf of negative capability! Sometimes I feel like that's all I'm really trying to aim for in what I write, maybe almost to a fault.

SBF-like figures are troubling and make me impatient with the times we're stuck with. Where will it end for him? Also now I may have to go rewatch the Michael Fassbender version of Jane Eyre.

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That’s a great film (even though the lead actress is much to pretty to play Jane, imho).

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Nov 15, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer

Matt's answer to the puzzle is easily visualized by making a chart of all 36 possible roll outcomes. From there we can count 11 in which one of the dice shows a three. Our instinct of counting 12 must come from counting the 3-3 combination twice?

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Yes, that’s the issue--we want to count the double three twice.

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Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer

This is an embarrassingly easy question for anyone with a math background. That this was considered interesting enough to ask an interviewee for whatever job it was (I haven't read the book) shows that the credentials needed for that job were WAY too low. Which applies to finance in general, as far as I can tell.

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You are right, but you also would be surprised. My husband does a lot of hiring of data scientists and statisticians, and he always starts his interviews with two very easy stats questions (so easy I got them right with no coursework in stats but just common sense). He uses them as a weed-out mechanism, and it is astonishing how many applicants get at least one of the questions wrong or don’t attempt to answer them.

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(But I agree with you about jobs in finance.)

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Nov 15, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer

I like your response to knee-jerk criticisms of Michael Lewis's new book, but my understanding is that he has also defended Bankman-Fried, though I haven't read a lot about that. He's also been criticized lately for THE BLINDSIDE and has made some not great remarks about the football player who was featured in the book. I've only read a little bit about both those controversies. Of course, none of that means the new book is compromised.

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He hasn’t really defended Bankman-Fried so much as not roundly condemned him. I think he feels a bit of residual affection for the guy after all the time he spent with him, which has come through in some of the interviews. But he definitely supports the conviction and has said so multiple times on his podcast Judging Sam (season 4 of Against the Rules).

The worst quote about Michael Oher (the football player from the Blind Side)--which has been taken to mean Lewis thinks football players are dumb--was taken out of context. After the line that everyone quotes, about how football players major in super-easy subjects, Lewis went on to say that Oher actually chose a challenging major and did well at it. That second part of the quote is never reported.

That being said, the Tuohy family sounds shady. They apparently put Oher in a conservatorship so that they didn’t have to adopt him and make him an heir. And I have read that their real motivation was not helping Oher, but making their alma mater’s football team strong--all while coming off as saints.

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deletedNov 15, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer
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Ha! You are reminding me of a joke:

A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are on a train to Scotland. The train crosses the border into Scotland, and they see a black sheep grazing by the track.

“Huh,” says the biologist, “there are black sheep in Scotland!”

“Huh,” says the physicist, “there is at least one black sheep in Scotland.”

“Huh,” says the mathematician, “there is at least one sheep in Scotland, at least one side of which is black!”

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Nov 15, 2023Liked by Mari, the Happy Wanderer

Alas, my logic was wrong and Matt is correct. When I did the chart myself I saw my error, so embarassing!

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You can’t imagine how long it took me to get how the question worked. Like the wheels of justice, I grind slow, but I grind fine!

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