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My Trouble with Bayes
In past consulting work I’ve wrestled with subjective probability values derived from expert opinion. Subjective probability is an interpretation of probability based on a degree of belief (i.e.,...
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Representative Omar’s arithmetic
Women can’t do math. Hypatia of Alexandria and Émilie du Châtelet notwithstanding, this was asserted for thousands of years by men who controlled access to education. With men in charge it was a...
View ArticleA Bayesian folly of J Richard Gott
Don’t get me wrong. J Richard Gott is one of the coolest people alive. Gott does astrophysics at Princeton and makes a good argument that time travel is indeed possible via cosmic strings. He’s likely...
View ArticleDaniel Kahneman’s Bias Bias
(3rd post on rational behavior of people too hastily judged irrational. See first and second.) Daniel Kahneman has made great efforts to move psychology in the direction of science, particularly with...
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Use and Abuse of Failure Mode & Effects Analysis in Business
On investigating about 80 deaths associated with the drug heparin in 2009, the FDA found that over-sulphated chondroitin with toxic effects had been intentionally substituted for a legitimate...
View ArticleA short introduction to small data
How many children are abducted each year? Did you know anyone who died in Vietnam? Wikipedia explains that big data is about correlations, and that small data is either about the causes of effects, or...
View ArticleThe Trouble with Probability
The trouble with probability is that no one agrees what it means. Most people understand probability to be about predicting the future and statistics to be about the frequency of past events. While...
View ArticleThe Trouble with Doomsday
Doomsday just isn’t what is used to be. Once the dominion of ancient apologists and their votary, the final destiny of humankind now consumes probability theorists, physicists. and technology...
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The Prosecutor’s Fallacy Illustrated – for MDs and Covid News Junkies
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV My last post discussed the failure of most physicians to infer the chance a patient has the disease given a...
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More Philosophy for Engineers
In a post on Richard Feynman and philosophy of science, I suggested that engineers would benefit from a class in philosophy of science. A student recently asked if I meant to say that a course in...
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