A few years ago, my colleagues and I decided to test the Diaconis-Holmes-Montgomery (DHM) hypothesis that a fair coin, when flipped in the air and caught in the hand, tends to land on its starting side slightly more often than 50% (Diaconis, Holmes, & Montgomery, 2007). In fact, DHM suggested that the effect would be about 1%, and they indicated…

Before proceeding, I should say something about Richard Feynman. In his physics work, Feyman was clearly a genius. And as a public persona, Feynman was certainly also charismatic (see for instance his interviews on YouTube). Moreover, Feynman helped popularize science by writing a series of books meant for a general readership. However, the available evidence suggests that Feynman had some…

LT;DR In the current era of AI, there is no longer any excuse for manuscripts that contain typographical errors, grammatical errors, unclear formulations, errors in equations, incorrect references, missing references, and a demonstrated lack of awareness for related work. A recent example of my own writing demonstrates that an AI (i.e., ChatGPT Pro) can offer high-quality feedback. Incorporating two rounds…

Recently I was hunting for an epigraph to start a manuscript on the topic of forgetting. Claude helpfully  suggested several options including one from 1821: “For a more literary and philosophical register, Thomas De Quincey offers something that resonates with the persistence of memory traces: “There is no such thing as ultimate forgetting; traces once impressed upon the memory are…

tl;dr: Bruss and Paindaveine did all of this already in December 2025, and better. The initial title of this post was “If This Does Not Blow Your Mind, Nothing Will”, but we didn’t want to be accused of producing clickbait. Still, if this does not blow your mind, nothing will. Hang on to your hats, there are several turns and…

On January 26th this year, Johnny van Doorn presented an hour-long tutorial lecture on “Theory and Practice of Bayesian Inference Using JASP”. You can check it out on YouTube here! Highly recommended. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers Eric-Jan (EJ) Wagenmakers is professor at the Psychological Methods Group at the University of Amsterdam.

For better or for worse, it appears that my most appreciated work is the children’s book Bayesian Thinking for Toddlers (the intro post is here and an exegesis is here). Piled up in my office is a stack of self-printed hardcopies that I hand out to students and colleagues; other than that, the book is not easy to obtain. Maybe…

The statistical significance test was not invented by Ronald Fisher. The key idea was already laid out by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926), whose 1885 article “Methods of statistics” is quite explicit about the purpose, design, and interpretation of the significance test. As summarized by Kennedy-Shaffer: In 1885, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth provided a more formal mathematical underpinning for the significance test…