Double-escaped dollar signs different to Jupyter Notebook

Describe the bug When escaping the $ in Jupyter notebooks, you need to double-escape \\$ so that it doesn’t try to render LaTeX. When the notebook is run through Sphinx to be converted to HTML, however, these now appear as “\$”, not “$”.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. clone https://github.com/ds-connectors/econ-models-textbook/tree/jb-0.7
2. run jupyter-book build ./
3. open _build/content/07-game-theory/utility.html
4. See error in 1st paragraph (image below)

Expected behavior The double-escaped dollar signs \\$ should be rendered as “$” not “$”

https://github.com/ds-connectors/econ-models-textbook/tree/jb-0.7

Here is the MD in the cell in the notebook:

# Expected Utility Theory

Imagine you're offered a choice between \\$1 guaranteed or \\$100 with probability $\frac{1}{80}$ (i.e. with probability $\frac{79}{80}$, you get \\$0). Which would you choose? Most people would be probably say the \\$1 because it's guaranteed that you'll get a positive outcome. But is that the rational choice?

In game theory, we consider rationality by examining the utility of different outcomes to individuals. To do so, we calculate the **expected utility** of a set of outcomes, which is the average of the utilities of those outcomes weighted by their probabilities. In the example above, there are two outcomes:

* \\$1 guaranteed. This occurs with probability $p_1=1$ and we'll say has utility $u_1 = 1$.
* \\$100 with probability $p_2 = \frac{1}{80}$. We'll say this has utility $u_2 = 100$.

The expected utility of the first choice would be $p_1 \cdot u_1 = 1$ because there is only one possible outcome and it has utility 1. The expected utility of the second choice would be $p_2 \cdot u_2 + (1 - p_2) \cdot 0 = 1.25$ because we obtain utility $u_2$ with probability $p_2$ and utility 0 with probability $1-p_2$. Notice that the expected utility of the second choice is higher! This means that, had you chosen the \\$1 guaranteed, you would have made the irrational choice, because it is _expected_ that you would get \\$1.25 as opposed to \\$1 with the second choice.

The idea that individuals, when making a gamble, will choose the option that maximizes the expected utility based on their preferences is called the **expected utility hypothesis**.

Here is the output screenshot:

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Python Version 3.6.5
• Output of jupyter-book --version:

Jupyter Book: 0.7.1
MyST-NB: 0.8.3
Sphinx Book Theme: 0.0.23dev0
MyST-Parser: 0.9.0
Jupyter-Cache: 0.2.2

[chrispyles]

Another thing that I’ve noticed related to this issue: dollar signs inside LaTeX equations need to be double-escaped to render correctly, but this only works in display math. In inline equations, you can’t have dollar signs at all or else the equation doesn’t render.

[choldgraf]

I’m a fan of treating pandoc as a “source of truth” for the “expected” pattern here, unless somebody in the JupyterLab/Notebook communities comes back saying that there was a specific reason to require two backslashes, it feels like a bug (or at least, a break from common implementations of this feature, that I suspect may be due to an implementation limitation).