Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

by Matt Parker

All humans are stupid when it comes to learning formal mathematics. This is the process of taking what evolution has given us and extending our skills beyond what is reasonable.

If you want something unlikely to occur, you simply need the patience to create enough opportunities to allow it to happen.

the false positives of assuming there is a danger when there isn’t are usually not punished as severely as when a human underestimates a risk and gets eaten. The selection pressure is not on accuracy. Wrong and alive is evolutionarily better than correct and dead.

In general, it’s amazing what you can prove if you’re prepared to ignore enough data.

It is a mathematical certainty that you can find any pattern you want, as long as you’re prepared to ignore enough data that does not match.

A correlation is never enough to argue that one thing is causing another.