Episode 74 - Gerrymander USA, The End of Civilization, and Monkey Business

The US Supreme Court says that it can’t weigh in on Gerrymandered districts. We look at the idea of Gerrymandering in the United States, armed with the new social choice tools that we picked up in previous episodes.

A Cloudflare outage temporarily takes down a portion of the internet. This may be evidence of a central point of failure, but could that central point be shrinking?

Finally we talk about a Bayesian argument in the Wall Street Journal and recently released book that claims to predict the end of the world. We break down what it’s claiming, how the tools of Bayes and Lindy fit in, and how much weight to put on the prognosis. How can we avoid our Turkey Consumption Holiday of Choice?

Then - we go completely off script, covering the possibility of continuing civilization on Mars and on pockets in Earth after a Nuclear disaster, the asteroid made of gold, and some monkeys finally reaching the stone age.

You have reached another Local Maximum indeed!

Links

Slate: Cloudflare Outage
New York Times: Supreme Court on Gerrymandering
North Carolinas Crazy Districts

Wall Street Journal: Bayes/Lindy argument for the end of humanity
Book: The Doomsday Calculation

Monkeys Reach the Stone Age
Amazon: The Original Planet of the Apes

Fox News: Golden Asteroid to make everyone a Billionaire
Bloomberg: That Giant Asteroid of Gold Won’t Make up Richer
Big Think: Space Miners Race to Asteroid
Peter Schiff: Golden Asteroid a Lie to Spread Bitcoin

Previous Episodes

Episode 72 on Shapely Values and Voting Systems
Episode 65 on the Probability of an Event that has Never Occurred
Episode 42 on untouched civilizations which is relevant to our discussion of either a dwindled human population or monkeys building stone tools.
Episode 21 on questions with only fuzzy answers
Episode 9 on the Lindy Effect
Episode 0 on Bayes Rule and How to Update Your Beliefs