Statistics – Page 208 – William M. Briggs

What Is And What We Know Of It, Probabilistically Speaking

Ontology is the study of what is and what is not. Epistemology is the study of our knowledge of what is and what is not. Though there are obvious points…

Statistics

Is It Okay To Force A Baker To Sell Cakes In Violation Of His Religious Conscience?

Here's the setup: a Colorado judge has ordered a Christian man and owner of a bakery that he must bake cakes for homosexual civil ceremonies (homosexual "marriage" is illegal in…

Statistics

The Top Five Mistakes In Marketing Statistics

Forgive me the title, won't you? It is my own creation, I admit, but numbered promises are eminently clickable. Plus they are the norm in business writing. Anyway, the real…

Culture Statistics

Scientism, Legalism and Precaution: Regulating Nutrition and Health Claims in Europe

Announcing a new paper, with official title "Scientism, Legalism and Precaution -- Contending with Regulating Nutrition and Health Claims in Europe" in European Food and Feed Law Review by Jaap…

Statistics

Twenty Tips For Interpreting Scientific Claims

Title of today's post is taken from article of the same name in Nature by William Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter, Mark Burgman. Several readers asked me to comment. I'll assume you've…

Culture Philosophy Statistics

Friedrich A. Hayek’s Lecture “The Pretense of Knowledge”

This was reprinted in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. I've chopped it into parts for commenting. To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the…

Philosophy Statistics

What Random Means In Random Number Generation

Thinking about one-time pads reminded me to point this out. It's simple, really. A "random" number generator spits out a string of numbers or characters from some set, say c1,…

Statistics

A Survey Of The Perceptions Of Climate Scientists 2013: No Consensus

Earlier this year scientists were given a survey on their opinion of the state of climate science. This was administered by Dennis Bray & Hans von Storch at the Helmholtz…

John M on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
I asked an AI: if the big bang theory is true, where is the center of the universe? The answer…
hudbwu on Confirmation Bias In The Minneapolis ShootingJanuary 14, 2026
@R W Pearson: Okay good, we're talking about it. If I understood Correia correctly, he offers the following defence: "the…
Tim on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
Absolutely true! After rephrasing or submitting more factual information, I get even more dismissive replies. Yeah, there are certainly "No…
John M on Confirmation Bias In The Minneapolis ShootingJanuary 14, 2026
I think law enforcement needs to revisit how they respond to vehicles. If a vehicle is classified as a deadly…
Rudolph Harrier on AI: The Earth Is Spinning Faster & Slower (Because “Climate Change”)January 14, 2026
One actually useful feature of public LLMs is to see what questions the establishment doesn't want you to ask. If…