Afterthoughts

For many psychology students, Bayesian statistics remains shrouded in mystery. At the undergraduate level, Bayes’ theorem may be taught as part of probability theory, but the link between probability theory and scientific inference is almost never made. This is unfortunate, as this link—first made almost a century ago—provides a mathematically elegant and robust basis for…Continue Reading Afterthoughts

C. S. Peirce on the Crisis of Confidence and the “No More Bets” Heuristic

[Note: This post is co-authored with Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and was originally published on The Winnower.] Many scientific disciplines find themselves in the midst of a “crisis of confidence,” where key empirical findings turn out to reproduce at an alarmingly low rate [e.g., 1,2,3,4]. The causes for the crisis are multifaceted and there does not appear…Continue Reading C. S. Peirce on the Crisis of Confidence and the “No More Bets” Heuristic

Simulating like a Bayesian

Thinking like a Bayesian is often different from thinking like an orthodox frequentist statistician. To be a frequentist is to think about long-run frequency distributions working with certain assumptions: What would the data X look like if T were true? Often, no attention is paid to the possibility that T might not be true and…Continue Reading Simulating like a Bayesian