Statistics – Page 178 – William M. Briggs

On The Uselessness Of Lie Detector (And Medical) Screenings, And The Ames Spy Case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8BUxVRwFY This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Have you seen the television series The Assets? Dramatization of the Sandy Grimes-Jeanne…

Statistics

How’d We Do On Our 2014 Predictions?

This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Time to tally. As has become our tradition, each New Year's Eve we see…

Statistics

Monty Hall And This Video Prove Probability Is Measure Of Truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-I0bAuEUE This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. This post is really an excuse to highlight a cute video that's being…

Philosophy 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…

Philosophy 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…

Culture 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…

Statistics

On The Attribution Of A Single Event To Climate Change

Rained yesterday here in the city of cities. Must be because of climate change, right? Hey. The climate did change and it did rain. What more evidence do you want?…

Statistics

The Philosophy Of Rock Paper Scissors

Way my dad and I used to play is that when somebody won they got to grab the hand of the loser and then, with the fore- and middle-fingers only,…

Zundfolge on The Charlie Kirk Killing Theories: The (Non)-Mathematics Of Conspiracy Theories 2September 23, 2025
This constant need to turn every murder of a prominent person into a JFK level conspiracy is tiresome. Bullets do…
Mark on In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No ValueSeptember 22, 2025
In light of today’s news from the WH, I’m eager to hear what you make of the link between Tylenol…
John Pate on In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No ValueSeptember 22, 2025
The powers that be have substituted for religion with Bad Science, it's not wasting money because it's furthering the agendas…
Uncle Mike on In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No ValueSeptember 22, 2025
If Bad Science was merely a waste of money, it wouldn't be so bad. Money is wasted all the time,…
Briggs on Class 65: A Last Plea Never To Use Or Trust Statistical Evidence Like ThisSeptember 20, 2025
Glenn, Clearly my enemies, responsible for all typos, are on the Student's side.