Posted inCulture Statistics
The Coming Cancer Panic
Maybe it won't be cancer. Maybe it will be irumodic syndrome or Clarke's disease. Or maybe it will be something else. But probably it will be cancer. If I had…
Posted inStatistics
That Conservatives Smell Different Than Progressives Study Stinks
Several readers asked me to examine the peer-reviewed study "Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues" by Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, and Peter K. Hatemi appearing in the…
Posted inCulture Philosophy Statistics
Statistics Good, Bad & Ugly
In an attempt to catch up on my 300-some emails (yes, the total has grown considerably; probably because of recent publicity), here are some articles sent in by readers that…
Posted inCulture Fun Philosophy Statistics
Stephen Hawking Thinks Too Much Of Us; More
Autumn of the Modern Ages What!? You haven't headed over to Mike Flynn's place and read his series The Autumn of the Modern Ages? Sometimes I don't understand you people…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
The Rise Of Bayes
Thanks to reader Frank Kristeller we learn that the far left New York Times yesterday ran an article by F.D. Flam praising the rise of Bayesian statistics: The Odds, Continually…
Posted inStatistics
A Wandering Mind Is An Unhappy Mind?
The gentleman who runs Shadow To Light asked me to take a look at a paper which Sam Harris approvingly quoted. The 2010 peer-reviewed one-page paper shares today's title (sans…
Posted inStatistics
Exposure To Fracking Reduces Low-Birth-Weight Babies
Shouldn't a peer-reviewed paper which purports to tie chemicals produced in the manufacture of natural gas (fracking etc.) to birth defects actually measure exposure (of fetus carriers, i.e. "mothers") to…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Comments On Dawid’s Prequential Probability
Phil Dawid is a brilliant mathematical statistician who introduced (in 1984) the theory of prequential probability1 to describe a new-ish way of doing statistics. We ought to understand this theory.…