Andy Seaton

I never remember to add these bloody things #StatsSky

If you've noticed a common mistake in the literature and you have a nice way of explaining why it's a mistake but don't have a solution, what should you do?

Is it worth a paper? What kind of paper? I'm imagining the academic equivalent of a blog post. Is that a thing?

This is fun. I just used it to back of the napkin the benefits of moving some finances around that I'm planning on doing this week. Very intuitive interface

Surely there are some kinds of unacknowledged bias that means "the main point" is weakened to the point of being almost useless?

Wait ...I need Karla to lose? Okay Picard as Karla has to lose but make it look like it's close so everyone maintains respect for everyone else and the federation can come into existence

If Karla wins then the west falls then the warp drive is invented by a russian instead and it becomes a tool for authoritarian oppression leading to an alternative future where the federation is EVIL

If it's nominated for the man booker it's a mark against. My partner doesn't get why. I say "they are trying way too hard to be clever"

Kinds of thoughts I have when I haven't slept well. I'm going to put my phone down

Cf why I hate "rational" Vs "emotional" thinking, like that's a real distinction. Mate, you love the feeling you have when you think you are being logical. It's emotions all the way down.

A lot of my philosophical disposition is based on deep emotion. I feel like this isn't talked about enough. Why isn't it valid to just say it feels right to think certain things and if you have a different emotional world then you'll probably think something different.

Reflecting today on how I ended up interested in statistics and finding myself being a kind of instrumentalist.

Big part of it was spending my early 20s using maths as a form of self soothing. And then at some point it stops working for that because you ask too much of the maths.

And it's getting smaller! I see explicit advice like "unless you really know what you are doing, just use stan" etc. (And I mostly agree with that - but sometimes you have to go it alone)

A screenshot of a paragraph from a piece of writing about statistics that reads: When the international community of physicists agreed on the statistical analysis they would perform on the data they collected at the Large Hadron Collider, they were doing statistics. But when they agreed what the conditions were for declaring the Higgs boson real or not, they were not really doing good statistics anymore. They were agreeing a position as a scientific community about when and how to leave an uncertain world and enter a new world with one new piece of certainty attached to it. The statistical work was one (small) piece of this decision making process. This community-driven process, viewed as a whole, should not, in my view, be seen as a part of statistics, though I understand that it looks like it could be. I should be really explicit here and emphasise that saying something is not statistics is not the thing same as saying that it is bad science.

Trying to write about "good statistical practice" and applying statistics to models with immense predictive power is the final boss.

I feel like this is a weird place to draw a line but I have to draw it here to be consistent with my opinions on messier applications of stats.

#statsky

Scientists actually created a device called Kissenger that lets people physically "kiss" each other through their phones, transmitting real lip pressure across the internet in real time.

feel like they might want to rethink the name

Never seen this before. Every time he named a car was a coin flip whether he'd crack or not. Gave me a good chuckle

Trying to blow the 5yo's mind by suggesting she cannot tell for sure if she is growing or if everything in the universe is shrinking except for her. She's having none of it though. She is smarter than many philosophers it would appear

PSA if you are typing quickly and want to type

xoxoxo

please be aware that these letters are close on the keyboard to a bunch of other letters and autocorrect may replace this loving sign off with

cockcock

Just something to be aware of. Definitely didn't just happen to me.

Economics has failed on the climate crisis. This complexity scientist has a mind-blowing plan to fix that Doyne Farmer says a super-simulator of the global economy would accelerate the transition to a green, clean world

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

A smidge of hubris in the air today

But has he reviewed the Heinz boil-in-a-tin sticky toffee pudding? I shall reserve judgement until then

If your therapist does not take kindly to debating the foundations of their methods then simply remind them that they were the ones who brought up 'grounding techniques' in the first place.

I enjoyed that. Reminded of when a 'celebrity' statistician came to town and over coffee I expressed annoyance that using established tools in new contexts wasnt seen as novel. "That wouldn't be original enough" was the response. I was just a PhD student, not confident enough to push back.

If he's made in my image it's highly likely

This is from the article The Bayesian Influence Or How To Sweep Subjectivity Under The Carpet.

He uses the term so much he abbreviates it to SUTC. Much SUTCing has occurred according to Good. He also thinks Goodian is a silly way to describe his philosophy so he calls it Doogian.

I've been reading Good Statistics by I. J. Good. He's entertaining as a writer. He's also pretty good at letting you know exactly what he thinks in the most unimpeachably polite British way possible.

#statsky

Not sure if this is relevant but it's what I thought of when I read the above thought experiment.

I used to meditate to instructions like "where is the visual field?" And sometimes I would think things like "it's just where it is, which is nowhere" and that seems linguistically unsatisfying.

Or "where is a thought?". If I'm aware of it, it should be somewhere. But that's nonsense.

Its times when I let my actual sense of humour show that I consider deleting all social media. Considering that right now

Just as I must keep the women busy with semen, so shall I also make sure that I write that paper I've been procrastinating on.

Reading some Montaigne and mostly I enjoy his little melancholic meanderings. Then sometimes he casually drops in shit like this.

In the short essay On Idleness