William M. Briggs

Since this is typically the slowest week of the year---even Christmas is busier---this is a good time to introduce something strange. About twenty years ago I wrote a skeptical (do…

The best model is no model! Display your data instead. We bring cause to models, we do not extract cause from models. Models do not say what happened: what happened…

Sabine Hossenfelder released a video in which she said, "Now that Science told me I can't make any choices, I make better choices." Or words to that effect. She wants…

You will have heard about the slow-motion suicide of the English has now made mandatory by their rulers, who evidently have grown tired of living with each other. And, since…

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…