jlamberts

We always used to go up to Torch Lake during summer when I was a kid. Collected a bunch of these. The easiest way to find them is to bring some water with you and go for a walk on a rocky road, and pour the water on likely rocks. The water makes the pattern much clearer and fewer people look for them on the roads.

I think in theory most people would agree that a benevolent dictator is a good thing both economically (monopolies) and politically (actual dictators). The problem is that human nature gets in the way in both cases, so you can't really trust a company or a leader to stay benevolent (or that their successor will be even if they are).

It's also possible that the heart benefits outweigh the side effects. A lot of medicine is just saying "this sucks but if you don't do it you'll die" and prescribing the least bad option.

Bayesian statistics says the opposite. By looking at the history of an entire city, you're giving yourself a highly uninformative prior. This means that it's very difficult to actually draw conclusions from the results. You have to reduce your population size first, and then perform your "test" (looking at search history) on the subset of the population who actually has a reasonable chance of committing the crime even without the search evidence.