A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “statistical reasoning”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott Alexander warns against forming strong heuristics based on limited data, using examples from AI research, elections, and campaign strategies to illustrate the pitfalls of this approach.
Scott Alexander examines why compelling but unlikely stories on large internet platforms are probably lies, despite our reluctance to believe so.
Scott Alexander questions the plausibility of multifactorial explanations for trends, using the US crime rate decline as an example, and seeks literature on comparing single-factor vs multi-factor explanations.
Scott Alexander criticizes a Guardian article's flawed reasoning in claiming 'Limits to Growth' accurately predicts economic collapse, comparing it to the philosophical 'grue-bleen induction problem'.