Statistics – Page 190 – William M. Briggs

More Reasons Not To Use The Precautionary Principle: Update

All probability is conditional and we are always interested in some proposition, call it X. We want to know "the probability of X". Well, there is none: not ever. There…

Statistics

Stream: Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space!

Today's post is at The Stream: "Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his co-authors fail to show their precautionary principle provides any guidance in…

Culture Statistics

Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized Against Reality at The Federalist

Today's post is at The Federalist: "Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized Against Reality". So Ars Technica sent a young man who bills himself as an "educator" and hydrologist to the…

Statistics

Idols With Wee P Values. Statistics As Ritual

Or, rather, wee p-values are idolized. And it isn't just me saying so. Reader Dan Hughes points us to Gerd Gigerenzer and Julian Marewski's peer-reviewed paper "Surrogate Science: The Idol…

Statistics

Cheating With Polls Down Under. Guest Post by Stephen Dawson

Today's post is from our friend Stephen Dawson, who writes at hifi-writer.com. I scheduled this in advance, knowing I'd be suffering jet lag. Professor Will Steffen from the Australian National…

Statistics

The Need To Believe In “The Solution” To Global Warming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgM1yhwj1mg Travel day, plus I wanted to have this on its own anyway. Speech given at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change, June 12, 2015 in Washington, DC. The…

Fun Statistics

Corrigan Brothers’ Statistics Song. Finally Released!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k2j96hpEkM Ladies and Gentlemen, it has arrived. The world famous Corrigan Brothers have another hit! What they did for Barack Obama in their mega-smash There's No One As Irish As…

Culture Statistics

The Stream: The Scientific Pantheist Who Advises Pope Francis

Today's post is at The Stream, "The Scientific Pantheist Who Advises Pope Francis: The scientist who influenced Laudato Si, and who serves at the Vatican's science office, seems to believe…

Philip Rogan on Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the AntsSeptember 29, 2026
Effective Altruism is something else I've never hard of but apparently has been infecting academic circles for decades. I took…
John M on Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the AntsSeptember 29, 2026
Thanks for reminding me of that classic Klingon joke!
Rob Potter on Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the AntsSeptember 29, 2026
Asimov's robot stories are the best example that an artificial intelligence is not intelligence. They were a fabulous way for…
John Pate on Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the AntsSeptember 28, 2026
We should all re-read our Ted Kaczynski materials. A man ahead of his time.
Brian (bulaoren) on Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the AntsSeptember 28, 2026
While in university, I took a class called "Symbolic Logic". Logic was then taught through the Philosophy department, which was…