Posted inStatistics
What’s The Probability Of A Nuclear War?
For readers in a hurry, here's the answer: There is no probability of a nuclear war. Nor of a conventional one. Nor even of you being victor in your next…
Posted inStatistics
The Big Worldwide Strike
Ignorant, a. Destitute of knowledge; uninstructed or uninformed; untaught; unenlightened. [1913 Webster] Recall a group of ignorant kiddies skipped school a while back in order to shake their wee fists…
Posted inClass Statistics
Control Groups With No Cancers In Hormesis Data Sets
A well known paper by Duport et al. on radiation hormesis makes a statement about control groups which is not quite right. The paper is "Database of Radiogenic Cancer in…
Posted inStatistics
The Conceit of AI
It helps every time you hear "AI" to think "statistical model". Because, of course, that's what AI is. Statistical models layered with clever data processing, that is. Curve fitting. Saying…
Posted inStatistics
Low-Hanging Molecules Have Already Been Picked—Most New Drugs Provide No Benefit
Remember the old stock scam? Call up 1,000 people and tell half Stock A will rise, and tell the other half it will fall. Five hundred people will be slightly…
Posted inCulture Statistics
The Great Protest In England Draws To A Close
Have you heard this? Only 1% of people aged 18-24 identify as Church of England, according to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey for 2018. Even among over-75s, the most…
Posted inClass Statistics
Why The Bootstrap Seems To Work—And Why It Produces Over-Certainty
Let's drag the statistician's hoary threadbare ball-filled bag out of the cupboard to make a point. In it are 3 white balls and 2 black. Using the statistical syllogism, we…
Posted inStatistics
Paper Says Some Psychiatric Diagnoses “Scientifically Meaningless”
The title is an understatement: Heterogeneity in psychiatric diagnostic classification. This is a paper in Psychiatry Research by Kate Allsopp, John Read, Rhiannon Corcoran, and Peter Kinderman. Abstract (to which…