Hey again, it’s your friendly neighbourhood Prince of Persia here. [1]
Before we start, I’d like to draw your attention to something! ⚠
Annoyingly (but not so surprisingly) a few people’s Gmail spam filters seem to have picked up this newsletter as… you guessed it… spam. 🤦♂️
Yessiree, some geniuses at Google were thinking of potential ways to combat internet scammers & spammers, and at some point reached the conclusion that one tactic of such miscreants would be to explicitly say WE’RE SENDING YOU SPAM. 😶
So if you decide to subscribe and don’t see a welcome email in your inbox, please check your spam/junk folder (or the promotions tab) and mark it as ‘not spam’ [2] and maybe even add the address to your contacts list. Massive thank you! 🙏
💡 Critical Thinking
An Introduction to Bayes’ Rule
In the first issue I touted Bayes' Rule as one of the most important and useful decision-making tools ever.
Bayes’ Rule (a.k.a. Bayes’ Theorem or Bayes’ Law) is a rule in statistics & probability named after the 18th century English reverend and statistician, Thomas Bayes. It describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event.
Without getting into the maths as much as humanly possible, the rule can be read as:
[ the chance of event A occurring, given that event B is true]
multiplied by
[the chance of event B occurring]
= equals =
[ the chance of event B occurring, given that event A is true]
multiplied by
[the chance of event A occurring]
So, very simply, it’s an equation with 2 numbers being multiplied on each side; if we know 3 out of 4, we can calculate the last one. And the numbers are the probability (chance) of something happening, expressed as a percentage (%).
Now, you may be wondering how one gets those three percentages to then calculate the fourth one… Or if any of this is of use to people without engineering degrees. 🤓 But fear not, as here at SPAM we only talk about practical things you can use to improve your everyday life [3] - so no percentages and calculations!
In the next issue, we’ll look into how evidence actually works, and how we can & can’t use it, before tying it back to Bayes’ rule.
🎶 Music & Art
World Beyond is an instrumental production music project that I discovered quite recently and fell in love with immediately.
As always, if you have any songs that you can’t stop listening to these days, esp. in languages other than English, please reply and let me know! 😃
🕳 Random Rabbit Hole
Gutzon Borglum was an American sculptor who created Mount Rushmore.
The son of Danish immigrants and born out of Mormon polygamy [4], he’s associated with many other public works of art, including the famous Alabama Marble bust of Abraham Lincoln.
Interestingly, the project he undertook (and aborted, over financial disputes) right before Mt. Rushmore - where he developed necessary techniques for sculpting on a gigantic scale - was the Confederate Memorial Carving on Stone Mountain, a project involving many KKK members. Borglum was also a Master Mason and a good friend of Teddy Roosevelt.
😈 Devil’s Word of the Week
Bacchus, n. – A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.
Is public worship, then, a sin, That for devotions paid to Bacchus The lictors dare to run us in, And resolutely thump and whack us? (Jorace.)
Btw, did you notice how all sections of this 2nd issue start with the 2nd letter 🅱 ?..
Once again, if you decide to subscribe and don’t see a welcome email in your inbox, please check your spam/junk folder and mark this SPAM as ‘not spam’. 😀
Till next time!
Prince 🦊
… And if it wasn’t your cup of tea but know a friend who likes this kind of, erm, tea(?), please consider sharing :)
[1] - How I just realised that Peter Parker and Prince of Persia have the same alliteration is beyond me. 😅
[2] - If this newsletter was human, it’d already have an identity crisis by now.
[3] - Ok this sentence did sound a bit like those junk emails that wanna sell you pills…
[4] - Imagine if his dad moved all the way from Denmark just to be able to do that. 🤣
(I should add that he eventually left the church and moved away.)