The Curious Engineer

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Probably Overthinking It

allendowney.com/blog

Data science, Bayesian Statistics, and other ideas

MathPythonSociety / politics / economy

Posts
200 from 20 Sep 2018 to 20 Sep 2026
Posting
weekly (24 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://www.allendowney.com/blog/feed/

2026 19

  1. An Agentic Data Science Story
  2. New Book!
  3. Think Java, but interactive
  4. Greatest GOAT of All Time?
  5. You Would Choose Now
  6. Who Is More Trusting: Liberals or Conservatives?
  7. The Frog Puzzle
  8. Sexual morality
  9. Confidence in Institutions
  10. Planning for your midlife crisis
  11. Changing Opinions on Assisted Suicide
  12. Trust and Well-Being
  13. Have the Nones hit a ceiling?
  14. Attention, Chinese Readers
  15. Young Adults Are Not Very Happy
  16. Field Sobriety Tests and the Base Rate Fallacy
  17. Don’t Bet on the Super Bowl
  18. The Girl Born on Tuesday
  19. Bayesian Decision Analysis

2025 16

  1. The Raven Paradox
  2. SAT math scores: gender difference or selection bias?
  3. The Lost Chapter
  4. Think DSP second edition
  5. It’s Levels
  6. Cancer Survival Rates Are Misleading
  7. The Foundation Fallacy
  8. Simpson’s What?
  9. The Poincaré Problem
  10. Think Linear Algebra
  11. Announcing Think Linear Algebra
  12. My very busy week
  13. Announcing Think Stats 3e
  14. Young Adults Want Fewer Children
  15. Algorithmic Fairness
  16. Confidence In the Press

2024 45

  1. Political Alignment and Outlook
  2. Reject Math Supremacy
  3. Young Americans are Marrying Later or Never
  4. Multiple Regression with StatsModels
  5. Hazard and Survival
  6. Download the World in Data
  7. What’s a Chartist?
  8. Comparing Distributions
  9. War and Peace and Zipf’s Law
  10. Think Stats 3rd Edition
  11. Bootstrapping a Proportion
  12. Ears Are Weird
  13. Rip-off ETF?
  14. Probably the Book
  15. Too many bronze medals?
  16. Where’s My Train?
  17. Elements of Data Science
  18. Density and Likelihood: What’s the Difference?
  19. PMFs and PDFs
  20. Regrets and Regression
  21. Have the Nones Leveled Off?
  22. Should divorce be more difficult?
  23. Which Standard Deviation?
  24. What is a percentile rank?
  25. Logarithms and Heteroskedasticity
  26. Combining Risks
  27. Bertrand’s Boxes
  28. Estimation with Small Samples
  29. Destructive Testing
  30. The mean of a Likert scale?
  31. Testing Percentiles
  32. Small percentiles and missing data
  33. What does “strength” mean?
  34. What does a confidence interval mean?
  35. Standard deviation of a count
  36. Data Q&A
  37. Think Python Goes to Production
  38. The Gender Gap in Political Beliefs Is Small
  39. Think Python third edition!
  40. The Political Gender Gap is Not Growing
  41. Political Alignment, Affiliation, and Attitudes
  42. Extremes, outliers, and GOATS
  43. Is the Ideology Gap Growing?
  44. Probably Overthinking It Notebooks
  45. The Center Moves Faster Than You

2023 36

  1. How Many Books?
  2. What are the odds?
  3. Smoking Causes Cancer
  4. Happy Launch Day!
  5. Superbolts
  6. Life in a Lognormal World
  7. We Have a Book!
  8. Why are you so slow?
  9. The World Population Singularity
  10. Another step toward a two-hour marathon
  11. How Does World Population Grow?
  12. What size is that correlation?
  13. The Overton Paradox in Three Graphs
  14. How Principal Are Your Components?
  15. Taming Black Swans
  16. How Correlated Are You?
  17. Homophobia and Religion
  18. Backlash of Homophobia?
  19. The Remarkable Decline of Homophobia
  20. Go Get the Data
  21. Abstracts and keywords
  22. Absence of Evidence
  23. Causation, Collision, and Confusion
  24. The Overton Paradox
  25. We Have a Cover!
  26. LLM-Assisted Programming
  27. How Many Typos?
  28. The Bayesian Killer App
  29. What does skew mean?
  30. Driving Under the Influence
  31. One Queue or Two
  32. Don’t discard that pangolin
  33. Never Test for Normality
  34. Resampling for Logistic Regression
  35. Smoking causes cancer
  36. Finding modes and antimodes

2022 14

  1. Overthinking the question
  2. Chasing the Overton Window
  3. The Long Tail of Disaster
  4. On pace for 2-hour marathon in 2035
  5. Polarization and partisan sorting
  6. Are we really polarized?
  7. Support for Gun Control is Still Declining
  8. The Plurality of the Nones
  9. Off to Technical Review
  10. Almost done?
  11. Preston’s Paradox
  12. The Student-t model of Long-Tailed Distributions
  13. How Gaussian Is It?
  14. Probably Overthinking The Book

2021 18

  1. Data Structures and Information Retrieval in Python
  2. Emitter Detector Redux
  3. Factors of Underrepresentation
  4. COVID-19 and the Inspection Paradox
  5. Bayesian Dice
  6. The Left-Handed Sister Problem
  7. Flipping USB Connectors
  8. In Search Of: Simpson’s Paradox
  9. Founded Upon an Error
  10. Simpson’s Paradox and Age Effects
  11. Simpson’s Paradox and Education
  12. What’s new in Think Bayes 2?
  13. Old optimists and young pessimists
  14. Bayesian and frequentist results are not the same, ever
  15. Simpson’s paradox and real wages
  16. Berkson Goes to College
  17. The Retreat From Religion Continues
  18. College Freshmen are More Godless Than Ever

2020 17

  1. When will the haunt begin?
  2. Millennials are not getting married
  3. Whatever the question was, correlation is not the answer
  4. Fair cross-section
  5. Alice and Bob exchange data
  6. Maxima, Minima, and Mixtures
  7. Think DSP v1.1
  8. Bayesian hypothesis testing
  9. Correlation, determination, and prediction error
  10. The Girl Named Florida
  11. The Elvis problem revisited
  12. Among U.S. college students, religious attendance is at an all-time low
  13. Young Christians are more sex-positive than the previous generation
  14. Generational changes in public spending priorities
  15. A large majority of Americans support legal abortion, at least in some circumstances
  16. Generational changes in religious belief and public policy
  17. Young Christians are less religious than the previous generation

2019 24

  1. Please stop teaching people to write about science in the passive voice
  2. Handicapping pub trivia
  3. Political alignment and beliefs about homosexuality
  4. The Dartboard Paradox
  5. What should you do?
  6. What should I do?
  7. What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
  8. Watch your tail!
  9. Left, right, part 4
  10. Left, right, part 3
  11. Left, right, part 2
  12. Right, left, apart, together?
  13. Matplotlib animation in Jupyter
  14. Report from SciPy 2019
  15. Backsliding on the path to godlessness
  16. Foundations of data science?
  17. Local regression in Python
  18. Happiness, Mental Health, Drugs, Politics, and Language
  19. Stop worrying and love the black box
  20. Bayesian Zig-Zag Webinar
  21. Are men getting married later or never? Both.
  22. The marriage strike continues
  23. Data visualization for academics
  24. The library of data visualization

2018 11

  1. Race, religion, and politics
  2. How to write a book
  3. Cats and rats and elephants
  4. August causes ADHD
  5. Lions and tigers and bears
  6. The Game of Ur problem
  7. How tall is A?
  8. The Dungeons and Dragons problem
  9. The six R’s of debugging
  10. Oliver’s blood
  11. New home