It was recently brought to my attention by several people that Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia whose blog is a must-read for anyone interested in applied statistics, had discussed my critique of Flaxman et al.’s paper on the effectiveness…
Category: Statistics
If you have followed the debate about how we should deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, you know that people have been fighting about Sweden since it decided to forego lockdowns and use a more relaxed approach. You wouldn’t know about…
As Europe and the United States are experiencing a second or third wave of the pandemic, depending on how you count, the debate about lockdowns is raging again. Many people are convinced they are the best way to deal with…
As you probably know, for the past few months, a controversy has been raging about hydroxychloroquine. Some people think it’s effective to treat COVID-19, whereas others think it doesn’t work or even that it’s harmful. One might have thought that…
[Note: This is a guest post by @jeuasommenulle, who usually talks mostly about banking on Twitter, but has been tweeting a lot about the reproduction number of COVID-19 lately. He recently told me that he’d been working on a model…
A couple of days ago Mansa Keita, a computer scientist, tweeted about a 16-year-old black prodigy who lives in the UK: A quick Google search reveals this story had first been reported in 2014, back when Ramarni — Wilfred is…
During the controversy about James Damore’s infamous memo, which I briefly discussed here, I read a lot of nonsense from a lot of people, who clearly don’t understand much about this debate. If you have been following the debate about…
I wrote a slightly different version of this post on Facebook the day before the election, in order to argue why it was irrational to buy the claims made by some pundits, such as Sam Wang from the Princeton Election…