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Jay Daigle

@profjaydaigle.bsky.social

194 followers 36 following 310 posts

Mathematician at GWU. I write about teaching, epistemology, math, and metascience, and how hidden assumptions shape our decisions and beliefs. I write at jaydaigle.net/blog

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think a lot about the way sports and dance and music teach kids. They have a much more developed praxis for instruction. Music lessons for kids make them do scales. But also try to convince them that "The C-D-E Song" is a real thing. (And get them to play simple tunes as soon as possible.)

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

As far as I know you've only written about it here acoup.blog/2021/05/28/c... and it seems like you agree with him, since this seems like a capsule summary of most of his argument:

I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Also reminds me of the claim that a Great Book "has no accidents". It's an attitude towards reading that starts from the presumption that the text Is Great and we should fundamentally defer to it. (How do we know it's Great? Because of its Greatness, obviously.) x.com/olivertraldi...

Excerpt from an interview of Mansfield by Tyler Cowen. Highlighted: "There are no accidents in a great book. Everything is as it should be. To understand it, you don't want to go to some second-rate explanation that doesn't take account, or rather departs from, the text."

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-09-29

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

www.smbc-comics.com/comic/local

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

Huh, my understanding was most classes taught completing the square one week, and then derived the quadratic formula the next week and thus everyone immediately forgets completing the square. See e.g. OpenStax intermediate algebra: openstax.org/books/interm...

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 12/08/2024

xkcd.com/984/

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 26/06/2024

Okay, but nearly half of the participants they DIDN'T give $1000 also secured housing. (The $50-a-month group started from a somewhat higher base, though, which seems like a partial randomization failure.) This is much less impressive than the headline. www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/09/2023

I've written about this a bit before. It's a big driver of the replication crisis, that we want (1) statistically significant results (2) that show surprising things. If we do enough studies we'll find those results, and they will be bullshit. jaydaigle.net/blog/hypothe...

Researchers are motivated to discover new and surprising things; and we, as news consumers, are most interested in new and surprising results. The wild overestimates that these low-power studies produce are surprising and counterintuitive, precisely because they are false. But they are surprising and counterintuitive, so they tend to draw public attention and show up in the news.

But a surprisingly large result isn’t as counterintuitive as one that’s the opposite of what you expect. (Imagine if a study “proved” that 5-year-olds are taller than 15-year-olds!) And low-power studies give us those results too.

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Jay Daigle @profjaydaigle.bsky.social · 23/09/2023

I really like this from Jonathan Falk via Andrew Gelman. Reminds me of: we reward research that produces counterintuitive results. But counterintuitive results are exactly the ones that are unlikely to be true—it's less interesting to find evidence for what everyone believes.

But honestly, I feel like both the garden of forking paths and p-hacking are just versions of Bitcoin’s Proof of Work method. You get rewards for showing how much effort you had to go to get SIGNIFICANCE. If you have a study with a p-value on your first try of 1e-8, people will say “But that result was obvious! Why do they even bother with a test?” If you garden-of-forking-paths or p-hack your way to 0.047, you will be credited for your perspicacity.

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