No, we would not. The Southern hemisphere is just generally warmer (at least on land).

Given what I understand to be the dominant stereotypes about American cars, though, I do think it's plausible that American car manufacturers are insane.

Ironically, I've noticed that European cars have the worst cupholders.

Unconvincing but valid advice nonetheless. If (the protestant) God existed, people who hadn't read the Bible would be uneducated for that reason, and would gain a great deal from reading the entire thing. I can't just tell you the one portion relevant because 1) you might need to read the rest to understand and 2) reading the rest would be good for you anyway.

If God existed, "read the Bible!" would be excellent advice.

Babylon, Rome, and the Aztecs had a great deal in common.

Apart from being great empires, what else did they have in common?

Later, around the Renaissance, crossbows, pikes, and guns unseated the knight from military dominance; and the system that best supported that sort of force turned out to be the republic.

As late as 1914, most countries in the Old World were still monarchies. The republics that happened to exist during the Renaissance (Genoa, Venice) were mainly maritime powers, so no crossbows and pikes.

Later, the Industrial Revolution kicked this sort of thing into high gear, with new military paradigms arising every few decades: ironclads, tanks, planes, nukes. Supporting all of these required the economy to be cranked up to the maximum degree possible to make all that stuff, and scientific research as well to figure out the next trick. As it happens, the form of society that seems to work best at that is something resembling a liberal democracy.

The Nazis and Soviets were quite good at military technologies. At least the latter collapsed for reasons unrelated to having weaker army than their competitors.

The post is endorsing the use of the Dark Arts. From a purely deontological perspective, that's objectionable. From a virtue ethics perspective, it could be seen as stooping (close) to the level of our enemies. From a consequentialist perspective, we need to compare the harm done by using them against the benefits.

To make that comparison, we need to determine what harm the Dark Arts, in and of themselves, cause. It seems to me (though I could certainly be convinced otherwise) that essentially all the harm they comes from their use in convincing people to believe falsehoods and to do stupid things. Does anyone have any significant examples of the Dark Arts being harmful independent of what they're being used to convince people of?

"On inferences from Wei's biased coin design for clinical trials". You can always request fulltexts here.

I'd be interested in the linked Begg's paper but it's behind a paywall. Can someone please tell what exactly they had done and how did they obtain all those various p-values?

Only one out of 21 obstetricians could estimate the probability that an unborn child had Down syndrome given a positive test

Say the doctor knows false positive/negative rates of the test, and also the overall probability of Down syndrome, but doesn't know how to combine these into the probability of Down syndrome given a positive test result.

Okay, so to the extent that it's possible, why doesn't someone just tell them the results of the Bayesian updating in advance? I assume a doctor is told the false positive and negative rates of a test. But what matters to the doctor is the probability that the patient has the disorder. So instead of telling a doctor, "Here is the probability that a patient with Down syndrome will have a negative test result," why not just directly say, "When the test is positive, here is the probability of the patient actually having Down syndrome. When the test is negative, here is the probability that the patient has Down syndrome."

Bayes theorem is a general tool that would let doctors manipulate the information they're given into the probabilities that they care about. But am I crazy to think that we could circumvent much of their need for Bayes theorem by simply giving them different (not necessarily much more) information?

There are counterpoints to consider. But it seems to me that many examples of Bayesian failure in medicine are analogously simple to the above, and could be as simply fixed. The statistical illiteracy of doctors can be offset so long as there are statistically literate people upstream.

This version is one hundred times better, in my opinion.

The yesterday's version has the same information and it feels more Wise. Which is a good thing, in a society where Wisdom is valued and rationality ignored.

But it wouldn't make me stand up and do something about it. I would just read it, say "yes, yes, he is absolutely right", and then forget it within the next ten minutes.