I stole the title, adding the word "also", from an article by Rafael Irizarry at Simply Stats (tweeted by Diego Kuonen). First, brush clearing. Data scientists. Sounds like galloping bureaucratic…

The title says it all. But its presence implies, and it is true, that people often mistake the two. If you decide to bet fifty bucks the USA beats Germany,…

Reader Ken pointed us to Space.com's click-me-click-me! article "The 10 Mistakes People Make When Arguing Science". Since everybody loves numbered lists, I'll duplicate their efforts here, using their mistakes. Isn't…

Suppose you decided (almost surely by some ad hoc rule) that the uncertainty in some thing (call it y) is best quantified by a normal distribution with central parameter θ…

It's a lazy Saturday, so some musings today on entropy and information and probability. It's about time we started tying these things together. Things like the following are heard: "Given…

Last week of teaching! Randomness is not a cause. Neither is chance. It is always a mistake to say things like "explainable by chance", "random change", "the differences are random",…