William M. Briggs

Eastern Michigan To Install Zampolit In Every Classroom To Maintain Ideological Purity

Maintaining ideological purity requires constant vigilance. The Commissars in the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics knew this well. This is why they assigned zampolit, or political officers, to serve…

Statistics

Don’t Use Statistical Models (When You Don’t Have To. Which Is Nearly Always)

Today, a convincing argument proving the current practice of probability and statistics is mostly wrong, or wrong-headed. The picture above does---and does not---show herbicide use in several countries by year…

Culture Statistics

Science Asks: Why Are Angry Atheists Annoying?

What's more annoying than an atheist who harangues passersby about "rationality"? Easy answer: a scientist who announces a discovery about human behavior that was known by everybody since Adam. Our…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: More On The Possible Intellect

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We're still…

Philosophy

Vatican Analyzes The Difference Between Humans And Robots

Soon a robot will ask you if you want fries with that. Computer screens already do, in some locales. How does that make you feel? Hungry? That could be taken…

Statistics

Scientific People Understand Reality Less, New Research Didn’t Study

Headline: Religious people understand the world less, study suggests, which derives from the peer-reviewed paper "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?" in Applied Cognitive Psychology…

Culture

Seventy-Five Years After Pearl Harbor

Holy moly. Shinzo Abe is going to visit Pearl Harbor "on Dec. 26-27 to pray for the dead". Who saw that coming? According to the linked report: "We must never…

Culture Philosophy

Do I Exist?(Does Russia) Part II — Guest Post by Ianto Watt

Read Part I here. So God has already acted. There is no potentiality left in Him, as Aquinas would say. After all, He's already done everything. There's nothing left to…

NLR on Reading Bryan Johnson’s The Immortalism ManifestoOctober 26, 2026
All of this is vast speculation. Is it possible for people to live much longer, hundreds of years? Maybe so.…
John Pate on Class 98: Limitations of Genetic Associations With PersonalityOctober 23, 2026
The plasticity available in the brain and CNS is the confounding factor. Nature via nurture. What actually gets expressed is…
Brian (bulaoren) on Class 98: Limitations of Genetic Associations With PersonalityOctober 22, 2026
Across the world, many jurisdictions ban pet "pit bulls". Are they in error?
NLR on Against Numerology: Some Basic CalculationsOctober 19, 2026
The mathematician Richard Guy wrote a paper "The strong law of small numbers", where he said, facetiously, but also serirously:…
aGrimm on Book UpdateOctober 16, 2026
I'm looking forward to the book; warts and all the first was enlightening and fun to read.

William M. Briggs

Reading Bryan Johnson’s The Immortalism Manifesto

Class 98: Limitations of Genetic Associations With Personality

I’m Thinking Of A Number Between 1 and 5 (that you can’t guess)

Against Numerology: Some Basic Calculations

Class 97: The Goal Of Models

Book Update

Sexual Assault Galore At Cornell

Class 96: Can Bayesianism Quantify True Belief?

Top 10 Reasons AI Will Never Become Superintelligence: It Won’t Destroy Nor Save Us

Viewer Asks: Why Do I Bother?

Academics Call For The Killing Of Babies In “After-Birth” Abortions

Irrational Rationalists: Effective Altruists & The Planet of the Ants

Class 95: Answering P-Value Good Uses Challenges

Whoring For Climate Change

Lady Academics Tire Of Being Judged By Peer Review

Class 94: Quantifying The Unquantifiable

PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap Hanekamp

The MRS Degree — Guest Post by Johnathan Edwards

Politicians Demand “Right” To Be Protected Against AI

Class 93: P-values Challenge! List The “Good Uses” of P-value

Is the West Dying Out? The Demographic Crisis Explained: Jon Harris Podcast