Statistics – Page 186 – William M. Briggs

What That Spurious Correlation Website Tells Us About Statistics

Many (thanks!) readers sent links to Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations, whose motto is "Discover a new correlation - an interesting spurious correlation each day!" My favorite is tying the yearly…

Fun Statistics

Godzilla’s Changing Height: A Statistical Analysis

I grew up watching Channel 50's Creature Feature and Channel 7's 4 pm Monster Week movies, many of which featured Ultraman, Rodan, Gamera, Gargantua, and, of course, Godzilla. Too, I…

Philosophy Statistics

Frequentists Are Closet Bayesians: Confidence Interval Edition

Actually, all frequentists and Bayesians are logical probabilists, but if I put that in the title, few would believe it. A man might call himself an Anti-Gravitational Theorist, a science…

Statistics

William M. Briggs Sez: Keep That Impressive Middle Initial

You can take it from William M. Briggs, and also from the Today show: sporting a middle initial is a mark of sophistication, intelligence, and rugged manliness---or womanliness, as the…

Statistics

Researchers: Calling Girls Fat Makes Them Fat

Whatever you do, don't call somebody a "researcher". It could condemn them to a nasty, brutish, and short-tempered life. The kind where most of their time is spent scrambling for…

Statistics

Time Series And Causality: Global Warming Example

Temperature causes Here is an atmospheric monthly average temperature series: T = (61, 69, 69, 70, 72, 65, 63) (all F). What caused the temperature to take the value T1…

Statistics

Time Series Aren’t Easy: Tornado Deaths Example

Time series are the most abused statistics in the physical sciences. (It's an endless, raucous, peer-reviewed contest for the worst in the "soft sciences.") The Mann problem (is that a…

Philosophy Statistics

Physical Probability Doesn’t Exist

There have been many attempts to tie probability to physical chance. Here, briefly and for discussion, is why I think all of them fail. Ontology does not recapitulate epistemology Let…

terry-oldberg on The Philosophy of Probability and Statistics (Book. Sort Of.)August 1, 2025
Dear Briggs iBefore proceeding with your book, i recommend that you read the book entitled 'Foundations of Inductive Reading' the…
Terry oldberg on The Philosophy of Probability and Statistics (Book. Sort Of.)August 1, 2025
DEAR BRIGGS; YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE FACT THAT tHE PRINCIPLES OF REASONING ARE 'ENTROPY MINIMAX,' AS DESCRIBED BY…
JH on The If I Were God Fallacy & EvolutionAugust 1, 2025
But... all human expressions about God are generally made under the premise of "if I were God." lol
NLR on Class 59: The Hardest Hypothesis In The WorldJuly 31, 2025
Presumably if the tea and milk are mixed up sufficiently she couldn't tell from the taste or texture. So I'm…
Gespenst on Class 59: The Hardest Hypothesis In The WorldJuly 31, 2025
Perhaps one can do no better than to say, "Miss Grundworthy was presented with n cups of tea with the…