Tag: Paradox

Psychedelic therapy is emerging as a promising new treatment for depression, anxiety, addiction, and other mental health issues [1]. Many proponents are even envisioning a world in which psychedelic therapy, which is administered once or twice over the course of a month would replace the current sta...

The above is a pretty old question that I recently saw resurface on Twitter. Since I disagree with the answer given there, I figured I’d post my own analysis. The tricky thing with this question is that it is self-referential. Usually, multiple-choice questions look like this: T...

Simpson’s bias is a statistical paradox first described by Edward H. Simpson in a 1951 paper titled “The Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables.” It demonstrates how aggregated data can mask underlying behaviors within sub-groups. This phenomenon occurs when a relation...

On first reflection, if someone asked you the question: “How long the coastline of Great Britain?” (or any other landmass for that matter) You’d probably give it your best guess and return an integer in miles or kilometres. The true answer however, is that it depends! Determinin...

The potato paradox is a very simple paradox, but many people find it quite surprising, and confusing, or might even refuse to believe it. Suppose you buy 100 kg of potatoes. Potatoes contain water, of course, and these particular potatoes contain 99% water. Overnight, some of the wat...

Theoretically, the chances of two people having the same birthday are 1 in 365 (not accounting for leap years and the uneven distribution of birthdays across the year), and so odds are you’ll only meet a handful of people in your life who enjoy the same birthday as you. This leads many people ...