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The fallacy of the one-sided bet (for example, risk, God, torture, and lottery tickets) Internet weather forecast accuracy

Some class-participation demonstrations for decision theory and Bayesian statistics

Posted on February 9, 2007 8:57 AM by Andrew

The jar of quarters is my favorite, but I like all of them.

This entry was posted in Bayesian Statistics, Teaching by Andrew. Bookmark the permalink.

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Daniel Lakeland on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 12:27 PM
Anonymous. The subjectivity of actually rolling balls down the inclined plane is not super high. But when it comes to…
AAAnonymous on Is fabricating data worse than fabricating results? Is failing to correct a known false report more or less serious than making the false report in the first place?July 16, 2026 12:03 PM
Quote from above: "As a side note, when reading the blog post by Mr. Nosek on the Center for Open…
John Hall on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 16, 2026 10:31 AM
My comment on the prior ranked choice post was kind of hinting that Condorcet is better. You address one potential…
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 8:57 AM
Other: I accept that you are confused. It's hard for writing to be clear to everyone, in part because different…
Other Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 6:21 AM
I never said you were gatekeeping based on price of your books or articles (it is commendable that they are…
Robin Blythe on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 4:23 AM
Many thanks Bob, don't think I've read most of these myself so I'm keen to learn something as well. Cheers.
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 4:19 AM
Other: There's no "special club" here, nor is there any "gate." Bayesian Data Analysis is available for free on pdf,…
Other Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 16, 2026 4:10 AM
It’s not uncommon to write prior belief about a parameter as conditional on a model M as well as background…
AAAnonymous on Is fabricating data worse than fabricating results? Is failing to correct a known false report more or less serious than making the false report in the first place?July 16, 2026 3:04 AM
Quote from above: "Where does this all stand relative to failing to correct or even doubling down on claims whilst…
Sean on “Archaeology can’t give social scientists population or GDP, but here are some things we can measure that might be useful for social science.”July 15, 2026 7:41 PM
Hi elin, in stats terminology, archaeology can often give proxies for the variables that social scientists want, but can rarely…
Anonymous on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 6:48 PM
Andrew: Point taken. JD: I don’t know why that makes a difference. Saying science is subjective seems to lead you…
Daniel Lakeland on Supplement that alphabetized display with another graph showing the states in a more informative order.July 15, 2026 6:26 PM
Joshua, I agree we shouldn't litigate the history of this discussion. Suffice it to say that we didn't see eye…
Evan Rosenman on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 5:52 PM
A few replies to follow-up points: - The substitute for Platner may well be someone other than Jackson, Shah, or…
elin on “Archaeology can’t give social scientists population or GDP, but here are some things we can measure that might be useful for social science.”July 15, 2026 4:56 PM
I really don't get where people are saying there is "no" data. There are data, they are not the same…
elin on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 4:35 PM
I don't think that ranked choice is really designed for anything but getting the first place winner. It's interesting as…
Joshua on Supplement that alphabetized display with another graph showing the states in a more informative order.July 15, 2026 4:29 PM
Daniel - You say: > "You're not arguing against me now, it's just taking you time to understand what my…
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 3:53 PM
Jd: "Belief" seems to be used either as a slur (by non-Bayesians who want to justify their non-use of prior…
jd on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 3:42 PM
AG - probably so. I too mostly use “model”, as in ‘prior model’ and ‘observational model’. However, I also understand…
Andrew on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 3:34 PM
P.S. I take it back. Paul pointed to a couple places where Brooks did admit mistakes. Good for you, David!…
Mark Phariss on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 3:30 PM
>"This unintuitive fact is a generalization of a well-known feature of ranked choice voting elections: it does not satisfy the…
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 3:17 PM
Anon: For reasons discussed in this paper with Christian Hennig, I prefer to avoid the terms "subjective" and "objective" and…
Anonymous on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 3:09 PM
“Instead what would help is to show people that the whole endeavor is subjective, from the choice to study that…
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 3:08 PM
Jd: You write, "And yet if you call it 'knowledge'" and "I don’t see how it convinces those who are…
jd on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 2:58 PM
AG - I said semantics because Bob seemed to be largely agreeing with the authors but calling belief something else.…
Daniel Lakeland on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 2:52 PM
It's been a while since I read it, but I think in Kevin S Van Horn's article on Cox's theorem…
Andrew on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 2:03 PM
Jd: I never know what people mean when they dismiss something as "semantics." I think that the association of Bayesian…
Peter Dorman on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 1:40 PM
Your point about the Condorcet condition is well taken. A major point of ranked vote schemes since the days of…
Anonymous on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 1:38 PM
+1. Especially in conditions where there is not so much information and multiple plausible priors could be chosen, "belief" works…
Carlos Ungil on The oldest famous personJuly 15, 2026 1:30 PM
I apologize for killing Eva Marie Saint by mistake. SHE'S ALIVE. I read about Chernoff and was checking some other…
Andrew on The oldest famous personJuly 15, 2026 1:27 PM
Oh, I hadn't heard about Herman Chernoff. I'll have to write an obituary.
Carlos Ungil on The oldest famous personJuly 15, 2026 1:24 PM
Eva Marie Saint died earlier this month aged 102 and so did Herman Chernoff aged 103. Edgar Morin died in…
jd on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 1:17 PM
This all seems like semantics. I presume you ‘believe’ what you ‘know’. I’ve never quite understood peoples’ heartburn with the…
Carlos Ungil on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 1:01 PM
It's not clear to me if you agree or disagree with the authors. Talking about an "issue" suggests the latter…
Andrew on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 12:19 PM
Paul: Hey, give Rosenman a break! He was just writing a blog post, and everyone makes mistakes. OK, maybe not…
paul alper on A ranked-choice election in Maine: Using voting data to understand preferencesJuly 15, 2026 12:03 PM
I don't know if I have ever been to Maine, but is that "whomever" a hyper-correction for "whoever"? "whomever gets…
Bob Carpenter on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 11:08 AM
You can always give them a taste with empirical Bayes regularization (a kind of penalized maximum likelihood that lets frequentists…
Bob Carpenter on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 10:55 AM
My issue, inherited from Andrew, is that It's the framing as belief rather than knowledge and the implicit contrast between…
Matt Skaggs on Is fabricating data worse than fabricating results? Is failing to correct a known false report more or less serious than making the false report in the first place?July 15, 2026 8:40 AM
"Simonsohn supporting and Nelson and Simmons being silent about their P-curve forensic method and its (continued) use by them and…
Robin Blythe on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 15, 2026 5:01 AM
As an economist I am inherently sympathetic to framing statistics as an information problem, so at the very least I…
Mark Phariss on Survey Statistics: quantifying uncertainty in ranked choice voting pollsJuly 15, 2026 2:35 AM
That should be N(N-1)/2 two-way races.
AAAnonymous on Is fabricating data worse than fabricating results? Is failing to correct a known false report more or less serious than making the false report in the first place?July 15, 2026 2:31 AM
Quote from above: "Where does this all stand relative to failing to correct or even doubling down on claims whilst…
John Hall on Survey Statistics: quantifying uncertainty in ranked choice voting pollsJuly 14, 2026 9:13 PM
The interesting part to me is that you can also check how other alternative voting rules would turn out.
Mark Phariss on Survey Statistics: quantifying uncertainty in ranked choice voting pollsJuly 14, 2026 8:00 PM
N.B., instant runoff is only one form of ranked choice voting; while it's the most common today, it has some…
shira on Survey Statistics: toy example for energy balancing weightsJuly 14, 2026 2:40 PM
Thanks again, Jared ! I agree with you, it helps to think about the implied outcome model. I think this…
shira on Survey Statistics: toy example for energy balancing weightsJuly 14, 2026 2:38 PM
Thanks, Jared and Raphael ! Jared, it makes sense that energy balancing weights become a lot more variable than raking…
shira on Survey Statistics: Big Changes in the Times/Siena PollJuly 14, 2026 2:35 PM
Thanks again, Jared ! Starting to take a look at Barnard et al. (2025). I feel silly but I can't…
Carlos Ungil on “Making Statistics Work: Information Theory and Bayesian Inference”July 14, 2026 1:28 PM
> right on the second page they start talking about “prior beliefs,” which isn’t how I think of things at…
Daniel Lakeland on Supplement that alphabetized display with another graph showing the states in a more informative order.July 14, 2026 10:25 AM
>What I don’t think follows from it is that the order specifically, as opposed to the order-plus-everything-else bundle, is what…
Priya Banerjee on It’s Harvard time, baby: “Kerfuffle” is what you call it when you completely botched your data but you don’t want to change your conclusions.July 14, 2026 8:23 AM
The phrase "Academic kerfuffle" caught my attention, as it reminds me of the delicate balance between data-driven conclusions and the…
Andrew on It’s all about the nonlinearity: An interesting statistical example of flaws in a voter impact indexJuly 14, 2026 2:56 AM
Kj: Fair enough regarding primary elections. Similarly, Republicans in very Republican states have impact in the primaries. But that's not…

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