Statistics – Page 189 – William M. Briggs

Writer Says Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life Would Be Bad News For God. God Says Nope

The danger of writing about that in which you are ignorant is that you're bound to look foolish. Let's see an example. Jeff Schweitzer, who bills himself as a scientist…

Philosophy Statistics

The Crisis Of Evidence: Why Probability And Statistics Cannot Discover Cause. New Paper

Cancer of the albondigas is horrifyingly under-diagnosed. See your doctor today and ask him if Profitizol is right for you. Today's post, in a way, is at Arxiv: The Crisis…

Culture Statistics

Stream: Vatican Environmental Conference: A Marriage of Bad Governors and Bad Science

Today's post is at the Stream: Vatican Environmental Conference: A Marriage of Bad Governors and Bad Science. The excerpt here keeps my caveman joke which was lost somewhere downstream. Jerry…

Philosophy Statistics

Bread From Something Or Nothing? Or, What’s A Miracle?

We interrupt our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles for this brief message. You've heard of the miracle of loaves and fishes? What's a miracle? How do miracles happen? Read these…

Philosophy Statistics

More Reasons Not To Use The Precautionary Principle: Update

All probability is conditional and we are always interested in some proposition, call it X. We want to know "the probability of X". Well, there is none: not ever. There…

Statistics

Stream: Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space!

Today's post is at The Stream: "Attack Of The Black Swans From Outer Space: Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his co-authors fail to show their precautionary principle provides any guidance in…

Culture Statistics

Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized Against Reality at The Federalist

Today's post is at The Federalist: "Climate Change Alarmists Appear Immunized Against Reality". So Ars Technica sent a young man who bills himself as an "educator" and hydrologist to the…

Statistics

Idols With Wee P Values. Statistics As Ritual

Or, rather, wee p-values are idolized. And it isn't just me saying so. Reader Dan Hughes points us to Gerd Gigerenzer and Julian Marewski's peer-reviewed paper "Surrogate Science: The Idol…

McChuck on The MRS Degree — Guest Post by Johnathan EdwardsSeptember 17, 2026
"South Korea and Japan will no longer exist, perhaps in our lifetime, if they don’t start reproducing or bringing more…
McChuck on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 17, 2026
How many of the breast milk lab techs (doesn't that sound filthy out of context?) were wearing latex gloves, known…
JH on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
The alternative to preserved clay is, sooner rather than later, mouldy clay… Does this mean to create fear? There are…
Cary Cotterman on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
Growing up in the late 1950s, I played with modeling clay almost every day. Who knows, back then it was…
Phil R on PFAS and Preservatives: Entrenching Chemophobia through Everyday Stuff — Guest Post by Jaap HanekampSeptember 16, 2026
I'm no expert but I think it's a little over the top comparing PFAS with Agent Orange. PFAS, for the…