Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Improper Language About Priors
Suppose you decided (almost surely by some ad hoc rule) that the uncertainty in some thing (call it y) is best quantified by a normal distribution with central parameter θ…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
I Also Declare The Bayesian vs. Frequentist Debate Over For Data Scientists
I stole the title, adding the word "also", from an article by Rafael Irizarry at Simply Stats (tweeted by Diego Kuonen). First, brush clearing. Data scientists. Sounds like galloping bureaucratic…
Posted inCulture Philosophy Podcast Statistics
Podcast: Peer Review, Bob & Ray Do Statistics, Academic Calls For Killing Of (Post-Birth) Babies
[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_12dec2014_0006.mp3[/podcast] Show Notes Wired's PubPeer article. PubPeer.com itself. PubPeer's discussion of "Macroscopic Observability of Spinorial Sign Changes under 2π Rotations". Bob and Ray can be found at, inter alia, the…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Infinite Surprise And Impossible Events
It's a lazy Saturday, so some musings today on entropy and information and probability. It's about time we started tying these things together. Things like the following are heard: "Given…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Don’t Use Statistics Unless You Have To
We're finally getting it, as evinced by the responses to the article "Netherlands Temperature Controversy: Or, Yet Again, How Not To Do Time Series." Let's return to the Screaming Willies.…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
BBC: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? BBC: Because Something
Opens the BBC's campaign: Some physicists think they can explain why the universe first formed. If they are right, our entire cosmos may have sprung out of nothing at all.…
Posted inBook review Philosophy Statistics
An Introduction To Uncertainty: Probability, Statistics, and Modeling of All Kinds
This is a teaser, the first part of a 3,200-word narrative outline for the book that I've started to shop around. The current title is in the headline. Regular readers…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
On Nate Silver’s Predictions: Which Side Of The Probability Equation Are We On?
When I checked FiveThirtyEight.com's Senate prediction, it said "Republicans have a 72.3% chance of winning a majority." There were also words that the "probability that each party will win control…