It's a doozy, this error of ours. So ubiquitous is it that it's hardly noticeable. Yet it is sinking us into scientism and wild overconfidence. Every time it appears, both…

Phrases like "100 year rainfalls" or floods or whatever for whatever period of time are awful. They convey an improper idea of uncertainty. The phrase "X year event" is based…

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…

Update 6 Sep 2014 Yet another another another study has claimed "statistical significance", this one by Philip Kokica, Steven Crimpc, and Mark Howdend. "A probabilistic analysis of human influence on…

Our friend Christos Argyropoulos (‏@ChristosArgyrop) to a popular medical site in which Stephen Reznick asks "Keep statistics simple for primary care doctors." He can't read the journals, because why? Because…