My talk at the Simons Foundation this Wed 5pm

Anti-Abortion Democrats, Jimmy Carter Republicans, and the Missing Leap Day Babies: Living with Uncertainty but Still Learning

To learn about the human world, we should accept uncertainty and embrace variation. We illustrate this concept with various examples from our recent research (the above examples are with Yair Ghitza and Aki Vehtari) and discuss more generally how statistical methods can help or hinder the scientific process.

6 thoughts on “My talk at the Simons Foundation this Wed 5pm

  1. I like something of the form “calculate uncertainty & estimate variation” better than “accept uncertainty and embrace variation”

    Not all uncertainty deserves embracing. Uncertainty due to crappy measurement or a bad model or a weak statistical procedure is different from uncertainty inherent to the physical phenomenon itself.

    To the extent uncertainty reveals our ignorance about the world we want to reduce it not embrace it. Fuzzy estimates are not always better than point estimates.

  2. When I saw this talk announcement, my first thought was, well: if it’s not further than across the street at Club Monaco, then I am not ruling out attending. And it turns out not to be further than across the st. at club Monaco. But Gelman might prefer that I contrapose the first conditional so that it’s in the form of a “falsification”.

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