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 do, except […]
Nothing Is Distributed: So-Called Random Variables Do Not Follow Distributions
People say “random” variables “behave” in a certain way as if they have a life of their own. To behave is to act, to be caused, to react. This is reification, perhaps […]
Richard Carrier’s Argument To Show God’s Existence Unlikely Is Invalid And Unsound
In the comment section to an earlier piece of mine on Strange Notions, Richard Carrier invited me to “interact” with him through his article “Neither Life nor the Universe Appears Intelligently Designed”, […]
Randomness And The “Null” Hypothesis
Last week of teaching! Randomness is not a cause. Neither is chance. It is always a mistake to say things like “explainable by chance”, “random change”, “the differences are random”, “unlikely to […]
Real Climate Temperature “Trend” Article Gets It Wrong (Like So Many Do)
This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Everything that can go wrong with a time series analysis has gone wrong with the post […]
It’s World Statistics Day! Death To P-Values, Hypothesis Tests, And False Ascriptions Of Cause! #StatsDay15
Who said the UN doesn’t do anything useful? Courtesy of that august body, it’s World Statistics Day! Official statistics help decision makers develop informed policies that impact millions of people. Improved data […]
The Mysticism Of Simulations: Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Sampling, And Their Alternatives
Introit Ever heard of somebody “simulating” normal “random” or “stochastic” variables, or perhaps “drawing” from a normal or some other distribution? Such things form the backbone of many statistical methods, including bootstrapping, […]
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, slap the […]
Recent Comments