Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Statistics Really Is: Part I
It's so simple that you'll think I'm kidding. Worse, the way I'll show it is such a radical departure from the manner in which you're used to thinking about probability…
Posted inPhilosophy
Philosophic Issues in Cosmology IV: Creatio Ex Nihilo—Guest Post by Bob Kurland
Bob Kurland is a retired, cranky, old physicist, and convert to Catholicism. He shows that there is no contradiction between what science tells us about the world and our Catholic…
Posted inCulture Statistics
HANDY Not So Dandy: NASA-Funded Mathematical Model Of Doom
Mathematically minded Remember back in the 1990s when otherwise intelligent people would look to the scientific literature and say, "Those guys must be right. They used a computer model." A…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What That Spurious Correlation Website Tells Us About Statistics
Many (thanks!) readers sent links to Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations, whose motto is "Discover a new correlation - an interesting spurious correlation each day!" My favorite is tying the yearly…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Statistics Really Is: Part II
Read Part I, Part Paradox I claimed, and it is true, that all statistical problems could be written $latex \Pr(p|q)$, where p is a proposition of interest and q is…
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 inStatistics
Failed Counterexamples To The Principle Of Indifference
What is the so-called Principle Of Indifference? A semi-screwy, semi-right idea in probability. To cadge an example from David Stove, let T be any tautology (a truth), then Pr(Bob…
Posted inStatistics
(Most) Everything Wrong With Time Series
It came out at my recent meeting that a compilation of everything wrong with time series was in order. A lot of this I've done before, and so, just as…
