William M. Briggs

Every so often people return to the "probability of God." Here are three men doing that. They worry about "priors" and "posteriors" and all the heavy apparatus of probability theory…

This week starts Part II of the Class: scientific modeling, in all its glories and, alas, failures. Science is model happy, and judges too often the goodess of models by…

It seems a battle most impossible to convince a good chunk of the population that AI is nothing more than a model. A model written in code, which of course…

Before we get to the peak pomposity of the Bethesda Declaration, a supreme How Dare You demand from credentialed and well-funded scientists to speak to the NIH manager, had you…

Please read this post on the site (click the title) if you have difficulty reading it in the email. Elon Muck infamously pitched a fit last week over his frustration…

Most forget their parameterized models are ad hoc, and so fret about how to put uncertainty on the parameters. Hence the cheerful reception of De Finetti's representation theory. WARNING for…

This is a revamped and updated classic post with new material. It first appeared on 6 February 2020. It's time to revisit this topic, as we'll see below. Polygenic scores…

Here, in two sentences, is the Dilemma of Technology: Fritz Haber earned the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber-Bosch process which synthesized ammonia from…