This Prior Distribution is Fine

In my research master course “Bayesian Inference for Psychological Science” (co-taught with Dora Matzke), students are asked to specify a beta distribution on the probability θ that I will bake a bacon pancake rather than a standard “vanilla” pancake. So θ is my “bacon proclivity” that students are unsure about. The chapter “The pancake puzzle” from our free course book…

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A Free Course Book on Bayesian Inference: [9.] Wrinch and Jeffreys to the Rescue

Since 2017, Dora Matzke and I have been teaching the master course “Bayesian Inference for Psychological Science”. Over the years, the syllabus for this course matured into a book (and an accompanying book of answers) titled “Bayesian inference from the ground up: The theory of common sense”. The current plan is to finish the book in the next few months,…

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Bayes Factors for Human versus ChatGPT Authorship Discrimination: Ultrafast Review of Bozza et al. (2023)

Today I came across the recently published article “A model-independent redundancy measure for human versus ChatGPT authorship discrimination using a Bayesian probabilistic approach” by Bozza and colleagues. As the title suggests, Bozza et al. use Bayes factors to quantify the evidence for texts being generated by humans versus ChatGPT. This seems exactly the right approach, and I am generally a fan…

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Plan Z: Why Politicians Should Ban Government-Funded Research from Being Published in Commercial Outlets

The current state of academic publishing is a sad affair. Academics (funded by taxpayers) edit and review each other’s work, an activity associated with truly staggering effort and costs (i.e., over 100 million work hours of peer review translating to an estimated monetary value of 1.5 billion US dollars per year; Aczel et al., 2021). When the work is deemed…

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Preprint: Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips

This post is a synopsis of Bartoš et al. (2023). Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started: Evidence from 350,757 flips. Preprint available at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.04153. Post-specific images were generated by Bing. Abstract Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we…

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A Free Course Book on Bayesian Inference: [8.] A Bayesian Reading List

Since 2017, Dora Matzke and I have been teaching the master course “Bayesian Inference for Psychological Science”. Over the years, the syllabus for this course matured into a book (and an accompanying book of answers) titled “Bayesian inference from the ground up: The theory of common sense”. The current plan is to finish the book in the next few months,…

read more