OK, friends, this is a big one. How Eugenics Shaped Statistics, my cover story for this month’s issue of Nautilus, is now online. F*cking love science and f*cking hate Nazis? Then boy do I have a surprise for you.
nautil.us/issue/92/front…

With this news out of Canada that doctors have been sterilizing indigenous women without their consent, it's a good time to recap some of the history of eugenics/racism and its relationship to statistics. Mute/unfollow if uninterested; this is long.

theguardian.com/world/2018/nov… Francis Galton, the founder of modern statistics, was a huge racist who also invented the word “eugenics.” One of his first statistical works, Hereditary Genius, was about the degree to which genius runs in families. He also tried to use statistics to rank the various races.

BTW, I worked my way through @nntaleb's paper so you don't have to. Unsurprisingly, it's garbage.
(cc: @NateSilver538)
drive.google.com/file/d/1tQj4ZG… His main idea is that election forecast probabilities should be traded as option prices. This leads him to construct a stochastic process Y that these can be “derivatives” from, something like the vote-share in favor of a candidate.