Statistics – Page 58 – William M. Briggs

It Will Soon Be Impossible For You Not To Be Sick, Even If You’re Healthy

It's too late for you, doomed reader. You know I love you, but I may have killed you. This makes me sad. Unless you are one of my despised enemies.…

Statistics

Did The Covid Vax, Or Any Vax, Cause ADHD or Autism? Steve Kirsch’s Survey Data Analyzed

This site is mirrored at Substack for those who prefer that format. Introduction Steve Kirsch ran a survey asking parents to say about their kids how many vaccinations of all…

Statistics

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:…

Johnno on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
I'm panicking about the people who believe enthusiastically in the capabilities of the AI that the other people are panicking…
Rudolph Harrier on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
I've started thinking of this as the "juice loosener problem" (after the Simpsons bit where Dr. Nick hawks an orange…
Cary D Cotterman on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
After spending years in school doing my own writing, then decades in my profession busting my ass to write somewhere…
Uncle Mike on The Great Smoothing: Another Reason Not To Fear (or trust) AIMarch 10, 2026
AI isn't the entity smoothing the data. The alleged decline in Arctic sea ice was a key assertion in Algore's…
JH on A Synchronicity Or Coincidence? What Is Behind Curious Events?March 10, 2026
The definition of cause can vary, and each incident may have its causes or contributing factors. I see coincidences as…