Recently a few members of R Core have indicated that part of what slows down the development of R as a language is that it has become increasingly difficult over the years to achieve consensus among the core developers of the language. Inspired by these claims, I decided to look ... [Read more...]

Introduction In the third installment of my series of criticisms of NHST, I focused on the notion that a p-value is nothing more than a one-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional space in which (1) the measured size of an effect and (2) the precision of this measurement have been combined in such ... [Read more...]

Introduction Continuing on with my series on the weaknesses of NHST, I’d like to focus on an issue that’s not specific to NHST, but rather one that’s relevant to all quantitative analysis: the destruction caused by an inappropriate reduction of dimensionality. In our case, we’ll be ... [Read more...]

Introduction This is my second post in a series describing the weaknesses of the NHST paradigm. In the first post, I argued that NHST is a dangerous tool for a community of researchers because p-values cannot be interpreted properly without perfect knowledge of the research practices of other scientists — knowledge ... [Read more...]

Introduction Over my years as a graduate student, I have built up a long list of complaints about the use of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) in the empirical sciences. In the next few weeks, I’m planning to publish a series of blog posts, each of which will articulate ... [Read more...]

I searched PubMed for several major DSM-IV disorders and downloaded the hits. Using ggplot2 I plotted the number of publications each year for each disorder. [Read more...]

Ever wondered how different psychotherapy orientations match up in a PubMed battle? Continue reading to find out and to see how to test this using R and Ggplot2. [Read more...]

lembarrasduchoix asked: thank you for the introduction to Newcomb’s paradox! Could you do a post on your favorite paradoxes?    The decision theory paradoxes I’m familiar with are: Ellsberg Paradox— Theorists encode bothsituations with unknown... [Read more...]

Two posts ago we showed you the digit sound system for remembering numbers. This week we provide two computer programs to help you create mnemonics. [Read more...]

Introduction This semester I’m TA’ing a course on the Psychology of Music taught by Phil Johnson-Laird. It’s been a great course to teach because (i) so much of the material is new to me and (ii) because the study of the psychology of music brings together so ... [Read more...]

Dividing a list of stimuli described by several statistics into subsets which are balanced according to these statistics is a common task in psychological research. For the purpose of preparing materials for an experiment which I am going to conduct &#... [Read more...]

Several years ago Gerd Gigerenzer wrote: “Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of science. Statistical rituals largely eliminate … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of ... [Read more...]

Recently, I’ve been fitting some models from the behavioral economics literature to choice data. Most of these models amount to non-linear variants of logistic regression in which I want to infer the parameters of a utility function. Because several of these models aren’t widely used, I’ve had ... [Read more...]

I’m helping out some colleagues learn programming from having zero experience with it in any shape or form. It’s quite a daunting task in some senses, because, well, it may not be easy! They are researchers, so they’ll need it for processing data and generating output, and ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A ... [Read more...]

Every academic field seems to develop a set of generic insults based on their intellectual toolkit. Here are two examples I hear often: Probabilists and Statisticians: “I think that’s an interesting case, but it’s in a set with measure zero.” Economists: “X group’s behavior is clearly rent-seeking.” ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]