Briggs

The strange insignificance of statistical significance

Who is more likely to support the death penalty: college undergraduates from a "nationally-ranked Midwestern university with an enrollment of slightly more than 20,000" majoring in social work, or those…

Statistics

Hannah Arendt on global warming theory

...there are, indeed, few things that are more frightening than the steadily increasing prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the councils of government during the last decades. The trouble…

Fun

A Return to Seriousness: 7 Best Songs About Beer; Or, God Bless the Pope

Update: the embeddings have been shifted to links, because the embeddings were eating up too much memory on some people's browsers. 7 John Lee Hooker/George Thorogood, One Bourbon, One Scotch,…

Philosophy

Randomness isn’t in charge of anything: the “hot hand” in basketball

The Wall Street Journal is helping Leonard Mlodinow tout his book The Drunkardâ€™s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Among other things, Mlodinow, like academics Tversky, Kahneman, and Gilovich before…

Fun

Internet Advertising Company to Fund Itself With Advertising

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Internet Advertising Company to Fund Itself With Advertising New York - July 4, 2009 - Word leader in being a new company engaged in ways of bringing…

Book review

Public Enemies — by Bryan Burrough

I am re-posting this book review because the movie came out today, and it might be of interest. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI,…

Statistics

The MIT Dahn Yoga Brain Respiration Experiment: Part I

This series originally begin 3 January 2009. This is only Part I; the remaining parts are linked below. INTRODUCTION On 20 September 2004, in the Physics Department at MIT, sponsored…

Statistics

Paul Krugman drags out the “T” word again

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is calling for the heads of "deniers" again. In his "Betraying the Planet", he says that anybody who doesn't agree with his understanding on…

Briggs on How Can You Tell If You Have ESP?June 30, 2025
Spetzer, All good points. I go into many of them later in the chapter.
spetzer86 on How Can You Tell If You Have ESP?June 30, 2025
If the receiver and sender independently wrote down the guess / card with no verbal communication, it might be better.…
JH on Class 56: The Best Model!June 29, 2025
How can you make predictions in the big data era without using a model? Trust your gut.
Jonas P. Kay on Which God Are You Rejecting? David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, Part IJune 28, 2025
I answer all by saying you cannot get something from nothing. There is beauty in its simplicity and it is…
Johnno on England’s Mandatory Suicide & WomenJune 27, 2025
So what's the betting pool on the odds about when and in which country will be the first to perform…