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Category Archives: Probability
A critique of “Naked Statistics” (Or, where is Rev. Bayes?)
We finally got around to reading Charles Wheelan’s 250+ page defense of frequentist methods in his 2013 book “Naked Statistics.” (Curiously, his book was published a year after Nate Silver best-selling tome “The Signal and the Noise,” a book that … Continue reading
A solution to Newcomb’s problem
Although “it’s not entirely clear that [Newcomb’s paradox] is well-posed” (see video at 8:11), Professor NJ Wildberger presents an elegant mathematical solution to this probabilistic problem in the video above.
Random book dispenser
What would Borges say? Props to JiveMonkey for the pic.
Testing our scientific tests
We recently reviewed the abstract and slides of Deborah Mayo’s 3 Dec. 2014 presentation at Rutgers University. Her excellent talk was titled “Probing with severity: beyond Bayesian probabilism and frequentist performance.” (Both the abstract and the slides of her lecture … Continue reading
Gaussian distribution of NBA scores
You can see the most common scores in such sports as basketball, football, and baseball in Philip Bump’s fun Wonkblog post here. Mr Bump writes: “Each sport follows a rough bell curve … Teams that regularly fall on the left side … Continue reading
Reverse legal lotteries
The increasing problem of overcriminalization (of private citizens and businesses, that is — policemen and regulators almost always get a free pass) has been noted before. In summary, overcriminalization threatens our economic liberties and undermines the rule of law. Matt Kaiser, moreover, describes … Continue reading
The reference class problem strikes again?
A public interest group based in Las Vegas — the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage — recently filed a petition alleging the non-random assignment of judges in a subset of same-sex marriage cases decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals … Continue reading
A critique of Hájek’s critique of “radical subjectivism”
Alan Hájek delivers a devastating blow against frequentism and other theories of probability in his influential 2007 paper “The reference class problem is your problem too.” In brief, when a hypothesis H or proposition P can be classified in various … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Probability
Tagged Alan Hajek, Reference Class Problem, Theory
2 Comments
A recent example of the reference-class problem
As Zeynep Tufekci explains in this excellent essay, the now-infamous Catcalling Video was not based on a random sample of New York City neighborhoods. Here is the actual and non-random breakdown of time spent in each neighborhood: In other words, the methodology of the … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Culture, Logical Fallacies, Probability
Tagged Biased Samples, Catcalling Video, Reference Class Problem
1 Comment
prior probability 