Statistics – Page 106 – William M. Briggs

Low-Hanging Molecules Have Already Been Picked—Most New Drugs Provide No Benefit

Remember the old stock scam? Call up 1,000 people and tell half Stock A will rise, and tell the other half it will fall. Five hundred people will be slightly…

Culture Statistics

The Great Protest In England Draws To A Close

Have you heard this? Only 1% of people aged 18-24 identify as Church of England, according to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey for 2018. Even among over-75s, the most…

Class Statistics

Why The Bootstrap Seems To Work—And Why It Produces Over-Certainty

Let's drag the statistician's hoary threadbare ball-filled bag out of the cupboard to make a point. In it are 3 white balls and 2 black. Using the statistical syllogism, we…

Statistics

Paper Says Some Psychiatric Diagnoses “Scientifically Meaningless”

The title is an understatement: Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification. This is a paper in Psychiatry Research by Kate Allsopp, John Read, Rhiannon Corcoran, and Peter Kinderman. Abstract (to which…

Statistics

Yes, There Is A Hot Hand In Basketball

On the Second of March in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred Sixty-Two, well before the sport became another venue for pencil-necked political correctness, a basketball player…

Class Statistics

The Doomsday Argument Is Doomed: Flawed Application Of Bayes

The WSJ on 27 June 2019 published an essay by William Poundstone on the hoary Doomsday Argument. Many are fooled by this equation, which contains a fundamental, even glaring, flaw.…

Statistics

The Epidemiologist Fallacy Strikes Again — Pesticides & Autism

Long-time readers will recall the epidemiologist fallacy is a shotgun marriage of the ecological fallacy and wee p-values. Make that and/or confidence intervals. For confidence intervals are equivalent to p-values…

Class Statistics

So-Called Random Numbers And Encryption: Update With Real-World Example

Psst. Hey, buddy. Word to the wise: "GQNZWZURUDPBFWDMEGBYIXGBGZRSVNHWOIQPPSH GXUVMZ". Keep it secret. That odd string of letters and spaces (well, once space) contains an encrypted message. In order to read…

terry-oldberg on The Philosophy of Probability and Statistics (Book. Sort Of.)August 1, 2025
Dear Briggs iBefore proceeding with your book, i recommend that you read the book entitled 'Foundations of Inductive Reading' the…
Terry oldberg on The Philosophy of Probability and Statistics (Book. Sort Of.)August 1, 2025
DEAR BRIGGS; YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE FACT THAT tHE PRINCIPLES OF REASONING ARE 'ENTROPY MINIMAX,' AS DESCRIBED BY…
JH on The If I Were God Fallacy & EvolutionAugust 1, 2025
But... all human expressions about God are generally made under the premise of "if I were God." lol
NLR on Class 59: The Hardest Hypothesis In The WorldJuly 31, 2025
Presumably if the tea and milk are mixed up sufficiently she couldn't tell from the taste or texture. So I'm…
Gespenst on Class 59: The Hardest Hypothesis In The WorldJuly 31, 2025
Perhaps one can do no better than to say, "Miss Grundworthy was presented with n cups of tea with the…