Posted inFun Philosophy Statistics
Best Statistics Question Ever
Several readers have sent this one in1. One Raymond Johnson (or was it Ryan Grover?) said he found the following picture on this blackboard (I pulled my copy from Flowing…
Posted inStatistics
BEST And The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy
Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy, has two columns about BEST's temperature reconstruction model: "Global Temperatures: All Over the Map" and "A New Trove of Global Temperature Numbers").…
Posted inStatistics
Two New Papers vs. BEST: Guest Post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert
Horst Lüdecke is a Professor of Physiker in EIKE, European Institute for Climate and Energy, Heidelberg; Dr. Link is a physicist with EIKE; Prof. Dr. Friedrich-Karl Ewert is a geologist…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Contingency, Causality, Determinism, And Free Will
In thinking about what probability means, it's important to sort out what is contingent and what relationship contingent events have to causality. Contingency simply means that what is could have…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part I
The rules of logic are simple. Use whatever evidence you have, and no other, to figure the probability of a conclusion. These rules are all we need to understand what…
Posted inFun Philosophy
The Red-Ball-In-The-Box Fallacy
Okay, friends, I need your help. One day last year, shortly after I had arrived in Taiwan, I awoke from a fitful, jet-lagged sleep at 2 a.m. with the argument…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part II
The models in Part I might not have "felt right" to you. But if that is so it is because your diet of probability examples has been too narrowly constricted.…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
What Is A True Model? What Makes A Good One?: Part III
We have had two cases so far: arbitrary models for counterfactual Martians (Part I) and a deduced model for an urn holding dichotomous objects (Part II). The logic was identical…
