Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Improper Language About Priors
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…
Posted inStatistics
Climate Change Causing Short Peruvians!
Who remembers those crank scientists who wanted to genetically engineer human beings so that they would be sprier and narrower and thus have smaller "carbon footprints"? We don't need 'em!…
Posted inPhilosophy Statistics
Don’t Use Statistics Unless You Have To
We're finally getting it, as evinced by the responses to the article "Netherlands Temperature Controversy: Or, Yet Again, How Not To Do Time Series." Let's return to the Screaming Willies.…
Posted inStatistics
Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors Of Political Ideology?
The study Another day, another dreary study purporting to show that the brains of "conservatives" are different than those of "liberals." This one hooked up to an electrical phrenology device…
Posted inBook review Philosophy Statistics
An Introduction To Uncertainty: Probability, Statistics, and Modeling of All Kinds
This is a teaser, the first part of a 3,200-word narrative outline for the book that I've started to shop around. The current title is in the headline. Regular readers…
Posted inStatistics
Paper Claims Surprisingly Strong Link Between Climate Change And Violence. Nonsense.
When does more crime happen, in winter or summer? Why? Too easy. How about this one: according to the FBI, what was the violent crime rate over time? No need…
Posted inStatistics
Please Don’t Smooth Your (Social Media) Data!
Don't Don't smooth your data and then use that smoothed data as input to other analysis. You will fool yourself. You will make over-confident decisions. It is the wrong thing…
Posted inStatistics
That Conservatives Smell Different Than Progressives Study Stinks
Several readers asked me to examine the peer-reviewed study "Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues" by Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, and Peter K. Hatemi appearing in the…