mrow84

This is shorthand for “the total wealth of the richest 0.1% of the population is greater than the total for the remaining 99.9%”, rather than the trivial “the individual wealth of each member of the richest 0.1% of the population is greater than that of each member of the remaining 99.9%”.

> The case emerged on July 20, when both organizations filed a complaint with the Belgian federal prosecutor against two members of the Israeli army’s Givati Brigade who were attending the Tomorrowland music festival with their military flags.

> The complaint accused them of direct involvement in war crimes and acts potentially constituting genocide in Gaza — specifically, indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, torture, and forced displacement.

Seems pretty clear?

All that bloodline stuff is real, but it’s a pretty small fraction of the population. Most people’s experience of class difference in the UK is economic, not hereditary (I think).

Your layman’s answer still doesn’t quite do it for me - if you had two masses in space, joined together by a wire, and you span them around their combined centre of mass, angular momentum would remain conserved even if we wound the wire in or payed it out. If I cut the wire, though, wouldn’t the masses immediately shoot off (roughly) in whatever direction they were travelling at the time? That is my interpretation of the “everything seems linear” perspective colordrops offered - it seems like you only get the apparent rotation because of all the other forces holding things together.

edit: I accept that the non-layman’s answer may hold, I just find the intuition a bit off.

“The argument is inescapable: Studies that are underpowered for the detection of plausible effects must occasionally return non-significant results even when the research hypothesis is true – the absence of these results is evidence that something is amiss in the published record. ”

This is a great insight.

That seems to be the author’s intent - to explain why we are having the discussion, rather than dismissing the cause as mere hysteria.

The claim wasn’t that there was an increase in control beyond that which you acknowledge (improved granularity) - it was about how that new power will be used.

It could be used to avoid unnecessarily inconveniencing customers, as you suggest, or it could be used to improve the strength of utility companies’ positions in disputes. Perhaps both?

> Most people would probably agree the latest models generalize better than flatworms.

> Flatworms first appeared 800+ million years ago

Surviving for 800 million years seems to me like a pretty good indicator of meaningful generalisation.

I find your exposition difficult to follow, perhaps you could write out your proposed solution without the accompanying explanatory text, so that we can clearly see how it resolves the paradox.

Inserting A=60 into the original line of reasoning (just to show that it doesn't immediately resolve the paradox):

1. Denote by A=60 the amount in the player's selected envelope.

2. The probability that A=60 is the smaller amount is 1/2, and that it is the larger amount is also 1/2.

3. The other envelope may contain either 2A=120 or A/2=30.

4. If A=60 is the smaller amount, then the other envelope contains 2A=120.

5. If A=60 is the larger amount, then the other envelope contains A/2=30.

6. Thus the other envelope contains 2A=120 with probability 1/2 and A/2=30 with probability 1/2.

7. So the expected value of the money in the other envelope is: 1/2(120) + 1/2(30) = 75

8. This is greater than A=60 so, on average, the person reasons that they stand to gain by swapping.

9. ...

edit: If anything, to me this obscures things further, because it makes it non-obvious that we are actually talking about ratios (i.e. 2A, 1/2A) rather than absolute numbers, and so the expectation calculated in step 7 is inappropriate - a geometric mean recovers the correct answer.