How’d We Do On Our 2019 Predictions?
A strong no prize this year. Nobody did well enough. Not enough specific predictions, or those that were specific did not come to pass. Doom predictions are too easy: they…
Register Your Predictions for 2020!
As has been our tradition these many years, it's time to register our predictions for the coming year. We look at how well we did last year tomorrow. Rules: Everybody…
Posted inFun
Blog Year In Review: Top 10 Reader & My Favorites
Tune in tomorrow to make your 2020 predictions! Results for 2019 coming Thursday. Reader Favorites Here were the Top 10 reader favorite posts of 2019, in which the numbers surprised…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
All Of The Supposed Paradoxes About The Principle Of Indifference Are Bogus
Here is an example of a supposed paradox caused by using Keyne's Principle of Indifference, which Stove and others (and myself) call the Statistical Syllogism (itself deduced from the symmetry…
Posted inClass Statistics
The Predictive Way Is The Only Way In Statistics: Sick Cow Edition
What is the purpose of modeling? There can be only two. The first is to say what happened, to explain. But in order to do this one must first assume…
Posted inStatistics
Forget Priors!
From Bill Raynor: Hello Matt, You like to discuss P(Y|M) a lot, but haven't spent much time talking about the practical construction of that. A topic I'd like to see:…
Posted inPhilosophy
Universal Skepticism Debunked — Guest Post by The Cranky Professor
Universal Skepticism and Its Problem with Pulling Goal Posts on Every Knowledge Claim Universal skepticism (otherwise known as absolute skepticism or global skepticism) is the view that real knowledge is…
Posted inStatistics
Nature Claims Cognitive Performance Declines After Being Exposed To A Candles
I used to review these papers in the hopes people would understand the old ways of doing statistics, in particular experiments on human subjects, were guaranteed to produce over-certainty. I…