Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Confidence Intervals, Logic, Induction
Induction "Because all the many flames observed before have been hot is a good reason to believe this flame will be hot" is an example of an inductive argument, and…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Replacements for Representation: Bayes From the Ground Up
A primary justification for Bayesian probability is De Finetti's representation theorem, which is stated like this. You are to observe a sequence of 0s and 1s, "failures" and "successes" if…
Posted inStatistics
Manzi: What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know
This article is nothing but an extended link to a must-read piece in City Journal. Internet still once daily. Thanks to reader I. for suggesting this topic. If you haven't…
Posted inStatistics
Epidemiology, Causality, And P-Values: Part II
Be sure to read yesterday's post first. One of the screwy consequences of classical statistics is that my odd sample (mixing babies and the patients from the brain cancer ward)…
Posted inBook review Statistics
The Great Global Warming Blunder by Roy W. Spencer
The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World's Top Climate Scientists by Roy W. Spencer This book was given to me for review by the publisher. Clouds…
Posted inStatistics
Lesson Zero: Lecturing, Churchill, and End of the World
Teaching as Performance The class is two weeks of solid statistics. Eight hours a day weeks; save the weekends. I don't know about other instructors, but my technique is to…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Lesson Somethingorother: Against the P-value
I've lost count of the lesson numbers. The definition of a p-value, here phrased in the incorrectly named "test of difference in means", is: Given the truth of a probability…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Lesson n+1: Measurement & Observables
Just a very crude sketch today: it is not complete by any stretch. Naturally, the students in the summer class don't receive this level of information. Best we can tell,…
