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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…
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The logarithm is a key concept in mathematics and statistics. Most students will be introduced to the logarithm as the function that is the inverse of exponentiation, or the function that turns multiplication into addition. But without a good intuition of what the logarithm actually is, students can struggle to remember how to compute the logarithm of base r for…
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This post is a teaser for Velidi, P., Wei, Z., Kalaria, S. N., Liu, Y., Laumont, C. M., Nelson, B. H., & Nathoo, F. S. (2025). Generalized Jeffreys’s approximate objective Bayes factor: Model-selection consistency, finite-sample accuracy, and statistical evidence in 71,126 clinical trial findings. ArXiv preprint:2510.10358. Abstract “Concerns about the misuse and misinterpretation of p-values and statistical significance have motivated…
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My colleague Raoul Grasman and I recently posted the preprint “A discrepancy measure based on expected posterior probability“. In this preprint, we show that the expected posterior probability for a true model Hf equals the expected posterior probability for a true alternative model Hg. It is not immediately obvious why this should be the case. In Appendix A of the…
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