Tag: statistics

Happy E.T. Jaynes Day

Most fascinating of all is Jaynes’ interpretation of probability theory. He realized that probability theory is a generalization of Aristotlean logic and by introducing degrees of belief this logic can be made much more flexible, as well as capable of dealing with uncertainty. This view is explained at length in his last work, Probability Theory – the Logic of Science. Although some parts of the book are fairly math-heavy, you can still get a lot out of the first few chapters with basic arithmetic.

Probability Theory – the Logic of Science sounds like a worthy read (after the black swan, which i just bought)

Research is false

There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.

Ioannidis presents a Bayesian analysis of the problem which most people will find utterly confusing. Here’s the idea in a diagram.


Suppose there are 1000 possible hypotheses to be tested. There are an infinite number of false hypotheses about the world and only a finite number of true hypotheses so we should expect that most hypotheses are false. Let us assume that of every 1000 hypotheses 200 are true and 800 false.

It is inevitable in a statistical study that some false hypotheses are accepted as true. In fact, standard statistical practice guarantees that at least 5% of false hypotheses are accepted as true. Thus, out of the 800 false hypotheses 40 will be accepted as “true,” i.e. statistically significant.

Too much Bayes?

it is quite likely that a frequently misspelled word eventually occurs so much in the wild that it is considered a valid word. Maybe Google needs some if statements in their code after all, instead of blindly trusting the popularity contest that is Bayesian analysis.

more like accelerated language development. once a spelling becomes popular, it is the new correct spelling by sheer gravitational pull. go forth and coin those terms 🙂