A reader recently disputed my condensation of the tenets of Bayesian subjective probability. (I promised a thread on which we could discuss the matter more fully, so here it is.) Here is […]
More evidence that people are more sure than they should be
From Jerry Pournelle (What? You haven’t read Lucifer’s Hammer yet?) on how just about everybody making bets in the financial markets were wrong. This “everybody” includes very highly educated, extraordinarily well paid, […]
Not all uncertainty can be quantified
(This essay will form, when re-written more intelligently, part of Chapter 15, the final Chapter, of my book. Which is coming….soon? The material below is not easy nor brief, folks. But it […]
Book coming…
I’ve been taking the past few days and building an Index for the my “101” book. It is painstaking, meticulous…well, excruciatingly dull work. But it’s nearly done. This is slowing me down […]
The limits of statistics: black swans and randomness
The author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has penned the essay THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS over at Edge.org (which I […]
Much too certain: miscellaneous Sunday topics
Today, a topic that I mean to expand—greatly—in the coming weeks. That theme, as you might has guessed, is too many people are too certain about too many things. Nothing more than […]
The limits of acceptable criminal behavior to combat global warming
I want to ask a favor of my regular readers and of those who occasionally come here to seek an alternate view. You can help me spread the word. Yesterday, we discussed […]
Demonstration of how smoothing causes inflated certainty (and egos?)
I’ve had a number of requests to show how smoothing inflates certainty, so I’ve created a couple of easy simulations that you can try in the privacy of your own home. The […]
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