A little blog of questionable wisdom written by Lucas Pierce. I do a lot of little things these days. I hope some of them do a little good.
These posts are old and new, serious and absurd, technical yet philosophical. I’ve kept even the questionable bits—partly for nostalgia, mostly as proof that wisdom arrives slowly, if at all.
If you’d like to reach me and don’t already know how, LinkedIn is probably your best bet. Students, I’ll likely reply; salespeople, probably not.
Latest Post
On my first attempt at Middlemarch, I made it about a hundred pages before Googling “does Middlemarch suck”, “does Middlemarch actually suck”, “do only pretentious people like Middlemarch”, and, my favorite, “emperor has no clothes Middlemarch”.
Middlemarch is a book you’re supposed to love. It’s the Godfather of novels. Virginia Woolf once famously called it a novel for grown-ups, which I take to mean “you’re an immature loser if you don’t like Middlemarch.” To me, though, it felt like one of those Lifetime movies my mother used to watch, where every time I walked into the room, a bunch of women were sitting around a dining room table talking and sometimes even tutting.
Continue reading →Decades ago, I took a test in a statistics class that included a version of the classic Monty Hall problem. You might know it: a game show host presents three doors. Behind two are goats, and behind one is a car. You pick a door, the host knowingly opens one of the other doors to reveal a goat, and you’re asked whether it makes sense to switch.
But as I remember it, my exam had one important difference. It said the host opened a door randomly, rather than deliberately choosing one with a goat. I interpreted that to mean the host might accidentally reveal the car. I thought my teacher was being tricky, intentionally giving us a variation on the classic problem. I worked through the possibilities and concluded that if the host opened a door randomly, and happened to reveal a goat, switching would give you a 1 in 2 chance of winning, rather than the traditional 2 in 3.
Continue reading →