Today is Allan Birnbaum’s birthday. In honor of his birthday, I’m posting the articles in the Synthese volume that was dedicated to his memory in 1977. The editors describe it as their way of “paying homage to Professor Birnbaum’s penetrating and stimulating work on the foundations of statistics”. I paste a few snippets from the articles by Giere […]
A famous chestnut given by Cox (1958) recently came up in conversation. The example “is now usually called the ‘weighing machine example,’ which draws attention to the need for conditioning, at least in certain types of problems” (Reid 1992, p. 582). When I describe it, you’ll find it hard to believe many regard it as causing an […]
Just as in the past 4 years since I’ve been blogging, I revisit that spot in the road at 11p.m., just outside the Elbar Room, get into a strange-looking taxi, and head to “Midnight With Birnbaum”. (The pic on the left is the only blurry image I have of the club I’m taken to.) I wonder […]
Is it possible, today, to have a fair-minded engagement with debates over statistical foundations? I’m not sure, but I know it is becoming of pressing importance to try. Increasingly, people are getting serious about methodological reforms—some are quite welcome, others are quite radical. Too rarely do the reformers bring out the philosophical presuppositions of the criticisms and proposed […]
I finally saw The Imitation Game about Alan Turing and code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII. This short clip of Joan Clarke, who was engaged to Turing, includes my late colleague I.J. Good at the end (he’s not second as the clip lists him). Good used to talk a great deal about Bletchley Park and […]
Just as in the past 3 years since I’ve been blogging, I revisit that spot in the road at 11p.m.*,just outside the Elbar Room, get into a strange-looking taxi, and head to “Midnight With Birnbaum”. I wonder if they’ll come for me this year, given that my Birnbaum article is out… This is what the place […]
Friday, May 2, 2014, I will attempt to present my critical analysis of the Birnbaum argument for the (strong) Likelihood Principle, so as to be accessible to a general philosophy audience (flyer below). Can it be done? I don’t know yet, this is a first. It will consist of: Example 1: Trying and Trying Again: Optional stopping […]
Today is Lucien Le Cam’s birthday. He was an error statistician whose remarks in an article, “A Note on Metastatisics,” in a collection on foundations of statistics (Le Cam 1977)* had some influence on me. A statistician at Berkeley, Le Cam was a co-editor with Neyman of the Berkeley Symposia volumes. I hadn’t mentioned him on […]
My paper, “On the Birnbaum Argument for the Strong Likelihood Principle” has been accepted by Statistical Science. The latest version is here. (It differs from all versions posted anywhere). If you spot any typos, please let me know (error@vt.edu). If you can’t open this link, please write to me and I’ll send it directly. As always, […]
A reader asks: “Can you tell me about disagreements on numbers between a severity assessment within error statistics, and a Bayesian assessment of posterior probabilities?” Sure. There are differences between Bayesian posterior probabilities and formal error statistical measures, as well as between the latter and a severity (SEV) assessment, which differs from the standard type […]
