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Let the Evidence Speak: Using Bayesian Thinking in Law, Medicine, Ecology and Other Areas
This book presents the most important ideas behind Bayes’ Rule in a form suitable for the general reader. It is written without formulae because they are not necessary; the ability to add and multiply is all that is needed. As well as showing in full the application of Bayes’ Rule to some quantitatively simple, though not trivial, examples, the book also convincingly demonstrates that some familiarity with Bayes’ Rule is helpful in thinking about how best to structure one’s thinking.
232 pages, Paperback
Published June 11, 2018
21 people want to read
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August 14, 2019
Q:
A long series of referenda may lie ahead (the “neverendum”). (c)
Q:
Sir Cyril Burt, an educational psychologist, claimed that IQ testing was a legitimate way of deciding the educational futures of eleven year old children. The justification was that IQ was largely inherited and so fixed. This claim rested on a study of twins who had been separated at birth and raised apart from each other. Some critics were not persuaded. Among other things Burt claimed to have had two female assistants, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, but these have never been found and were almost certainly invented. It seems that he had invented the data too. He was a fraud. His reputation has never recovered.
In 1982 two McKinsey management consultants, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, published a book In Search of Excellence. Their claim was that they had identified excellent companies and the characteristics that made them excellent. The book was a best seller. There was always some scepticism about their methodology and when a number of these excellent companies fairly quickly ran into trouble this scepticism grew. Eventually, in 2001, Peters admitted “This is pretty small beer, but for what it’s worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data”. Unlike Burt, this appears to have had no effect on the reputations and careers of Peters or Waterman, which you may think curious and perhaps indicative of the needs of their respective audiences—psychologists and managers. (c) Uh-huh, the apostles of ethics.
Q:
We like the personal, the story-telling, and pay attention to that rather than all that boring stuff about sampling. We latch on to the personal description and see that this fits our preconception of librarians more than others. Tversky and Kahneman called this the representativeness heuristic... (c)
A long series of referenda may lie ahead (the “neverendum”). (c)
Q:
Sir Cyril Burt, an educational psychologist, claimed that IQ testing was a legitimate way of deciding the educational futures of eleven year old children. The justification was that IQ was largely inherited and so fixed. This claim rested on a study of twins who had been separated at birth and raised apart from each other. Some critics were not persuaded. Among other things Burt claimed to have had two female assistants, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, but these have never been found and were almost certainly invented. It seems that he had invented the data too. He was a fraud. His reputation has never recovered.
In 1982 two McKinsey management consultants, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, published a book In Search of Excellence. Their claim was that they had identified excellent companies and the characteristics that made them excellent. The book was a best seller. There was always some scepticism about their methodology and when a number of these excellent companies fairly quickly ran into trouble this scepticism grew. Eventually, in 2001, Peters admitted “This is pretty small beer, but for what it’s worth, okay, I confess: We faked the data”. Unlike Burt, this appears to have had no effect on the reputations and careers of Peters or Waterman, which you may think curious and perhaps indicative of the needs of their respective audiences—psychologists and managers. (c) Uh-huh, the apostles of ethics.
Q:
We like the personal, the story-telling, and pay attention to that rather than all that boring stuff about sampling. We latch on to the personal description and see that this fits our preconception of librarians more than others. Tversky and Kahneman called this the representativeness heuristic... (c)
Displaying 1 of 1 review