Recently I was attended to a paper by Maharaj, Polson, and Sokolov, in which they provided a statistical analysis of a chess cheating allegation. Their abstract: We provide a statistical analysis of the recent controversy between Vladimir Kramnik (ex chess world champion) and Hikaru Nakamura. Hikaru Nakamura is a chess prodigy and a five-time United States chess champion. Kramnik called…

In a recent blogpost I introduced Marlijn Bouwman‘s painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), godfather of Bayesian inference. The painting is available under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site). This very painting now forms the cover of De Psycholoog, a Dutch magazine devoted to psychological science and insights relevant for psychological practice. Here is…

[Featured image taken from a painting by Marlijn Bouwman under a CC-BY license (and available from the artwork library on this site)] In the 1930s, the polymath Harold Jeffreys developed a general Bayesian philosophy on hypothesis testing. Essentially, Jeffreys wanted to formalize the idea of scientific caution in statistical reasoning. Jeffreys argued that “variation must be taken as random until…

Recently I commissioned a painting of Sir Harold Jeffreys (1891–1989), whose groundbreaking Bayesian work remains a constant source of inspiration to me personally. The painting is now hanging in my office overlooking the chaos below, but I want to share it with the world as well. The painter is Marlijn Bouwman, and the painting is available under a CC-BY license…

This week marked the launch of a new diamond open-access journal: the Journal of Robustness Reports. This journal will publish short reanalyses of published empirical research findings. This is the abstract of the editorial:    The vast majority of empirical research articles report a single primary analysis outcome that is the result of a single analysis plan, executed by a…

Inspired by an article on Ockham’s razor by Johnjoe McFadden, a previous post showed how a simple set of polyhedral dice can clarify the basic idea underlying Bayes factors. In the photo below, you see a family of four polyhedral dice: the D3, the D6 (this is the common six-sided die), the D12, and the D60.   The Setup You may assume…