Posted inCulture Statistics
Lord, Save Us From Impact Factors
Randy Schekman, a Big Cheese in the sciences, is right: people use "place of publication as a proxy for quality of science". Where a paper is often counts more than…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
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…
Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inCulture 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…
Posted inStatistics
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…
Posted inCulture 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…
Posted inPhilosophy 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,…