S-P-A-M #3 - What's Evidence, What's Boxing Day

Seeking Passion And Mastery

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas folks! 🎅

I received a nice Season’s Greetings email from my alma mater Cass Business School (now renamed¹ to Bayes Business School²) and my heart thanked whoever came up with the idea for handing me the perfect intro for this issue. 😁

Pretty good rhymes tbf

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💡 Critical Thinking

How evidence works

In the previous issue I introduced Bayes' Rule, which can be boiled down to an equation between two pairs of multiplied probabilities. As noted, we won’t be getting into calculations; we’ll be learning how to leverage Bayesian inference without needing to use any numbers.

Now we’ll look a bit into how evidence actually works, and how we can / can’t use it.
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Every day we face uncertain situations that require us to create a theory about reality. To determine if these theories are accurate, we search for evidence.

Here’s an example of a small everyday situation you’d do this for:

• theory: you think going for a run every morning will help you be more productive

• observation: you go for a run and then are very productive that day

• conclusion: your higher productivity is evidence that proves your theory

Such conclusions are wrong. ❌

To see why, we must first understand how evidence actually works.

We tend to think of evidence in terms of two extremes — it either proves a theory true, or it proves it false. But, evidence doesn't confirm theories with absolute certainty.

You can almost never use evidence to become 100% certain that a theory is true or untrue.

Evidence only tells you whether the theory is more or less likely to be true, compared to how true you thought it was before you encountered the evidence.

Read that one again! ☝

As such, in the example above, the observed higher productivity levels do not necessarily mean the theory about morning runs is correct. Of course, they also don’t necessarily mean it’s false either. But how do we interpret the (relative) strength of evidence in this example?

In the next issue, we’ll look into this with another important concept - the Question of Evidence. ❓

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🎶 Music & Art

I’ve been unable to stop listening to this 80s hard rock classic the past few days.³

And even if rock’s not your thing, I encourage you to watch the music video to get that glam blast from the past. 😁

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! 😃

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🕳 Random Rabbit Hole

I always wondered where the name for Boxing Day, the 2nd Christmas holiday on December 26 in the UK (and some Commonwealth countries), came from. Funnily enough, in all these years of making silly jokes about there not being much boxing 🥊 on that day⁴, no one else ever seemed to know where the name came from either.

So this time I actually googled it (🤦‍♂️) and the term goes back to the 18th century, about which the Oxford English Dictionary says "traditionally on this day tradespeople, employees, etc., would receive presents or gratuities (a "Christmas box") from their customers or employers." 📦

The term “Christmas box” dates back another century in Britain and seems to have meant a gratuity given at Christmas, to those who had rendered some sort of services for someone but had not been directly paid.

So, it’s about boxing, not boxing, if you get my drift.

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✍ Random Fellow Writer

Tara Giancaspro

followed me the other day.⁵ Her bio made me chuckle, so I thought why not follow her back and read her last post.⁶

In it she talks about her recent stay in Tulsa and provides a list of places to visit and eat at in her own voice. When looking to visit new cities I always look for guide blogs (preferably from a local) with this kind of authentic voice so I appreciated it.

Now will I be visiting Tulsa anytime soon? Hell no (sorry not sorry America), but at least I now know there’s more to Tulsa than being, as the dearly departed f.r.i.e.n.d of millions of us said, the “Paris of Oklahoma”.

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😈 Devil’s Word of the Week

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Christmas, n. – A day set apart and consecrated to gluttony, drunkenness, maudlin sentiment, gift-taking, public dulness and domestic misbehavior.

   What! not religious? You should see, my pet,
       On every Christmas day how drunk I get!
   O, I'm a Christian - not a pious monk
       Honors the Master with so dead a drunk.

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Don’t hesitate to let me know which of the sections above you really liked/disliked, or what else you’d like to see here, by commenting below or replying to this email.

And as a reminder, 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’. 😀

Enjoy the rest of your holidays peeps!

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. I, and the wide majority of alumni, do not agree (a story for another day) or care about the rename - it’s Cass forever.

2. The plot thickens 👀

3. Trivia for rock/metal fans: this is the 1983 re-release version; in the 1981 version, the track (and its eponymous album) had the slightly different name of Breakin’ the Chains.

4. It’s actually a day chock full of football ⚽

5. Would like to know from where…

6. Not a low bar; I rather despise people with no sense of humour.