Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Randomness & God
Reader Omer Abid points us to Serkan Zorba's article "God is Random: A New Perspective on Evolution and Creationism", which has concepts of interest to all of us (Abid asked…
Posted inStatistics
Headline: We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans. Amen: We Did
When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon---they little knew how…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Induction & Essence
Suppose we observe a raven. It's black. We see a second, also black. And so on for a few dozen more. We reason, or rather we argue with ourselves, "Since…
Posted inStatistics
Big Data, Big Predictions — Big Deal!
The title, you'll be shocked to learn, is sarcastic. You'll forgive the tone after reading NBC's article "Big Data's Big Misses: 2016 Was a Bad Year For Predictions", which opens…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
On The Demon Possessed Doll & Little Girl
You might have seen the video of the little girl playing near a doll, a doll which twitches its head without visible promoting. The video switches views and sees the…
Posted inStatistics
Stream: Hottest Yeah Evah
Stream: The Hottest Yeah Evah! Really? Or a yet another example of activism masquerading as science? Assume for a moment, as the press with triumphant glee is reporting, that 2016…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Tipler’s Tipsy Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics
We're back on our Edge series of concepts scientists wished more people knew about. Today's entry is Frank Tipler's Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics. Tipler: In 1957, a Princeton physics…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Bayesian Statistics Isn’t What You Think
Back to our Edge series. Sean Carroll says Bayes's Theorem should be better known. He outlines the theorem in the familiar updating-prior-belief formula. But, as this modified classic article shows,…