You go into the doc's office. He's not looking happy. He's holding your chart. "Mr Smith, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you." Give it to me straight,…

Today a paper which proves my contention that governments ought to get out of the grant-making business. The "study" was funded by NIH, and conducted by "top" scientists at Harvard.…

Many think confidence intervals are an improvement over P-values. Not really, no. There is no one alive, or dead, who interprets a confidence interval as theory demands. All (as in…

I flatter myself that this is the best general thing I have written to explain why you must never, not ever, use a p-value, hypothesis test, "significance", Bayes value, or…

Everything, Science says, will kill you or ill you. Or cure you. Last week I gave readers homework to go to scholar.google.com and type in "X 'reduces' risk" (or 'increases')…

In the Class, which I know all readers are dutifully following, bless you, I often cite Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations site. It is a glorious (growing) compendium of ridiculous results…

"Say, Briggs. Since you're Statistician to the Stars!, explain to me how I can tell if two means are different in a simple way that even I can understand." You…

Stick with me today, my friends. There is an important lesson buried in the madness, with a wider application than is at first apparent. A reader asked me to look…