Statistics – Page 178 – William M. Briggs

On The Uselessness Of Lie Detector (And Medical) Screenings, And The Ames Spy Case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8BUxVRwFY This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Have you seen the television series The Assets? Dramatization of the Sandy Grimes-Jeanne…

Statistics

How’d We Do On Our 2014 Predictions?

This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. Time to tally. As has become our tradition, each New Year's Eve we see…

Statistics

Monty Hall And This Video Prove Probability Is Measure Of Truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5-I0bAuEUE This post is one that has been restored after the hacking. All original comments were lost. This post is really an excuse to highlight a cute video that's being…

Philosophy Statistics

Improper Language About Priors

Suppose you decided (almost surely by some ad hoc rule) that the uncertainty in some thing (call it y) is best quantified by a normal distribution with central parameter θ…

Philosophy Statistics

I Also Declare The Bayesian vs. Frequentist Debate Over For Data Scientists

I stole the title, adding the word "also", from an article by Rafael Irizarry at Simply Stats (tweeted by Diego Kuonen). First, brush clearing. Data scientists. Sounds like galloping bureaucratic…

Culture Philosophy Podcast Statistics

Podcast: Peer Review, Bob & Ray Do Statistics, Academic Calls For Killing Of (Post-Birth) Babies

[podcast]https://www.wmbriggs.com/audio/wmbriggs_com_12dec2014_0006.mp3[/podcast] Show Notes Wired's PubPeer article. PubPeer.com itself. PubPeer's discussion of "Macroscopic Observability of Spinorial Sign Changes under 2π Rotations". Bob and Ray can be found at, inter alia, the…

Statistics

On The Attribution Of A Single Event To Climate Change

Rained yesterday here in the city of cities. Must be because of climate change, right? Hey. The climate did change and it did rain. What more evidence do you want?…

Statistics

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,…

Brian (bulaoren) on The Charlie Kirk Killing Theories: The (Non)-Mathematics Of Conspiracy Theories 2September 23, 2025
Has Occam's razor been banned yet?
NLR on In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No ValueSeptember 23, 2025
Such science is a genuine problem, but it's far down the list of the problems plaguing humanity right now. Generally,…
Zundfolge on The Charlie Kirk Killing Theories: The (Non)-Mathematics Of Conspiracy Theories 2September 23, 2025
I propose a Unified Field Theory of Conspiracy Theories. Most of them are false, and the false ones used to…
Cary Cotterman on The Charlie Kirk Killing Theories: The (Non)-Mathematics Of Conspiracy Theories 2September 23, 2025
Ever since L. H. Oswald, every assassination has had endless alternate theories, always involving another shooter, coverups, the CIA or…
Rudolph Harrier on In Which I Shockingly Agree With Sabine That Most Science Is Of Little Or No ValueSeptember 23, 2025
I was always suspicious of quantum factorization, due to how the results were always special cases. It was always claimed…