One year ago I reblogged a post from Matt Strassler, “Nature is Full of Surprises” (2011). In it he claims that [Statistical debate] “often boils down to this: is the question that you have asked in applying your statistical method the most even-handed, the most open-minded, the most unbiased question that you could possibly ask? It’s not asking whether […]
We had an excellent discussion at our symposium yesterday: “How Many Sigmas to Discovery? Philosophy and Statistics in the Higgs Experiments” with Robert Cousins, Allan Franklin and Kent Staley. Slides from my presentation, “Statistical Flukes, the Higgs Discovery, and 5 Sigma” are posted below (we each only had 20 minutes, so this is clipped,but much came out in the discussion). […]
I’m reblogging a few of the Higgs posts, with some updated remarks, on this two-year anniversary of the discovery. (The first was in my last post.) The following, was originally “Higgs Analysis and Statistical Flukes: part 2″ (from March, 2013).[1] Some people say to me: “This kind of reasoning is fine for a ‘sexy science’ like high energy physics (HEP)”–as if their statistical […]
July 4, 2014 was the two year anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery. As the world was celebrating the “5 sigma!” announcement, and we were reading about the statistical aspects of this major accomplishment, I was aghast to be emailed a letter, purportedly instigated by Bayesian Dennis Lindley, through Tony O’Hagan (to the ISBA). Lindley, according […]
Here are the slides from my presentation (May 17) at the Scientism workshop in NYC. (They’re sketchy since we were trying for 25-30 minutes.) Below them are some mini notes on some of the talks. Now for my informal notes. Here’s a link to the Speaker abstracts;the presentations may now be found at the conference site here. Comments, questions, and corrections […]
Being lonely is unnatural, at least if you are a slim Higgs particle (with mass on the order of the type recently discovered)–according to an intriguing statistical argument given by particle physicist Matt Strassler (sketched below). Strassler sets out “to explain the scientific argument as to why it is so unnatural to have a Higgs particle that is “lonely” — with no […]
I. Apparently I left out the last bullet in my scribbled notes from Silver’s talk. There was an 11th. Someone sent it to me from a blog: revolution analytics: 11. Like scientists, journalists ought to be more concerned with the truth rather than just appearances. He suggested that maybe they should abandon the legal paradigm […]
My colleague, Lydia Patton, sent me this interesting article, “The Philosophy of the Higgs,” (from The Guardian, March 24, 2013) when I began the posts on “statistical flukes” in relation to the Higgs experiments (here and here); I held off posting it partly because of the slightly sexist attention-getter pic of Marilyn (in reference to an “irrelevant […]
