Statistics – Page 57 – William M. Briggs

Experts: The Coronadoom Vax Only Worked If You Got It At Lunch

Nature headline: "Timing matters for COVID vaccine effectiveness: Younger and older people gained greater protection if they had their jabs in the middle of the day." Good joke: "Went from…

Statistics

Science Is Self-Perpetuating, Not Self-Correcting: Sea Ice Case Study

Headline from 2014: "Expert predicts ice-free Arctic by 2020 as UN releases climate report". Here from NASA is a picture by year of the estimated minimum sea-ice extent, which occurs…

Statistics

If You Had To Choose “Ignore Or Believe All Academics On Climate Change”, Which Is Smarter?

Update See the Twitter thread (and account) for many more examples. NOBODY has been able to find a word yet that Experts haven't tied to "climate change." Got an email…

Statistics

The Less You Know About Climate, The More You Cry About Climate

Some things, the saying goes, are too good to check. Take the peer-reviewed paper "Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety" by Hannes Zacher and Cort W. Rudolph…

Philosophy Statistics

There Is No Problem Of Old Evidence In Bayesian Probability

Rationalists, like those at Less Wrong (think Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander), are prone to fetishsize Bayes theorem, seeing it as the key to all thought. It isn't. Bayes is…

Statistics

How An AI-Machine Learning-Physics-Sociological-Whatever Model Can Be Good For One Man & Bad For Another

A model---which I do not distinguish between a theory---can be useful to one man and useless to the next. "But Briggs, people don't treat theories the same as models." Right:…

Statistics

Why Science Is Broken: Hillsdale Speech Video & Transcript Now Online

Video Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLFDjRS_928 And here is Greg's talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6VMcIp21mA Transcript I followed this closely during the speech, but did not adhere to it perfectly. I don't have a…

Statistics

Nothing Has A Probability: Roulette Wheel Pays Off

There are two essential, crucial things to take from the article "The Gambler Who Beat Roulette", and I beg that you will remember both: 1. You are meant to lose…

Neil Jordan on Class 79: Time Series ExampleFebruary 20, 2026
Does the passage of time cause ice, or does ice cause the passage of time? Mystical statistical court of appeals…
Johnno on The Importance Of Not Making DecisionsFebruary 19, 2026
But Briggs... we pay people to make decisions on our behalf... Government exists, and it MUST do SOMETHING!!! What are…
Johnno on AI Is Driving Many Crazy: Our Latest PanicFebruary 19, 2026
BRIGGS YOU FOOL OF ARTIFICIALITY! Aye Eye exists for one reason and ONE REASON ONLY! To INCREASE Shareholder Value! If…
JH on The Importance Of Not Making DecisionsFebruary 19, 2026
Maybe you mean “knowledge” instead of “belief.” When my daughter was in ninth grade, I asked her about evidence for…
gareth on AI Is Driving Many Crazy: Our Latest PanicFebruary 19, 2026
Yes "AI" is just computer models. Better - in the sense of more competent in tasks than before. This does…