Archive for lies
scientific Americans abide by Joe
Posted in Books, Travel with tags Agent Orange, climate change, COVID-19, Joe Biden, lies, pandemic, public health system, Scientific American, truth, uncertainty, US elections 2020, US politics on September 28, 2020 by xi'an
Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data‑Driven World [EJ’s book review]
Posted in Books, Statistics with tags big data, book review, democracy, lies, Nature, University of Amsterdam on August 26, 2020 by xi'an
“…this book will train readers to be statistically savvy at a time when immunity to misinformation is essential: not just for the survival of liberal democracy, as the authors assert, but for survival itself.Perhaps a crash course on bullshit detection should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum.”
In the latest issue of Nature, EJ Wagenmaker has written a book review of the book Calling Bullshit, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. Book written out of a course taught by the authors at the University of Washington during Spring Quarter 2017 and aimed at teaching students how to debunk bullshit, that is, misleading exploitation of statistics and machine learning. And subsequently turned into a book. Which I have not read. In his overall positive review EJ regrets the poor data visualisation scholarship of the authors, who could have demonstrated and supported the opportunity for a visual debunking of the original data. And the lack of alternative solutions like Bayesian analysis to counteract p-fishing. Of course, the need for debunking and exposing statistically sounding misinformation has never been so present.
Trump lies
Posted in pictures with tags Donald Trump, falsehood flies and truth comes limping after it, lies, NYT, The New York Times, trumpism on June 25, 2017 by xi'an“Trump achieved something remarkable: He said something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency.” David Leonhardt
Today, I spotted in the NYT this interactive catalogue of lies uttered publicly by Trump since he became President.
