Let them fail
The same experts, in Congress and out, who did not foresee and who promulgated the current banking/credit crisis are the same ones assuring us their plan for salvation is just…
Category: Statistics
The general theory, methods, and philosophy of the Science of Guessing What Is.
Next prohibition: salt
Here is a question I added to my chapter on logic today. New York City “Health Czar” Thomas Frieden (D), who successfully banned smoking and trans fat in restaurants and…
Hope in academia? Too many kids in school? And much more!
Hope in academia? Thanks again to Dennis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily for the link to Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic fads. The author,…
Why probability cannot be subjective
A reader recently disputed my condensation of the tenets of Bayesian subjective probability. (I promised a thread on which we could discuss the matter more fully, so here it is.)…
More evidence that people are more sure than they should be
From Jerry Pournelle (What? You haven’t read Lucifer’s Hammer yet?) on how just about everybody making bets in the financial markets were wrong. This “everybody” includes very highly educated, extraordinarily…
Not all uncertainty can be quantified
(This essay will form, when re-written more intelligently, part of Chapter 15, the final Chapter, of my book. Which is coming….soon? The material below is not easy nor brief, folks.…
Book coming…
I’ve been taking the past few days and building an Index for the my “101” book. It is painstaking, meticulous…well, excruciatingly dull work. But it’s nearly done. This is slowing…
The limits of statistics: black swans and randomness
The author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has penned the essay THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS over at Edge.org…