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…
read more
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…
read more
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…
read more
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…
read more
During his inaugural 2025 address, US President Donald Trump floated the idea that God protected him from an assasination attempt, in order for The Donald to act as an instrument in His hands to pull back the United States from the brink of disaster and make it Great Again. I believe that Trump’s electoral victory does in fact reveal something…
read more
Here we present a Bayesian analysis of data from a recent labor law case [cc; see also Hummel, 2024]. In the case, several trade unions argued that the Dutch Supreme Court had issued particular judgments (i.e., the “Enerco” judgment from 2014 and the “Amsta” judgment from 2015) that effectively imply legal restrictions on collective actions. The trade unions argue that…
read more
The Dutch government is about to unleash upon academia a series of draconian budget cuts coupled with a series of other measures that will stunt the growth of the Dutch knowledge-based economy to the maximum extent possible. What is Dutch academia to do? A large protest is planned on November 14th, but no one will listen. The current government was…
read more
The conference “Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences II” will take place October 16-18 (next week!) at the University of Amsterdam. Leading researchers will discuss Bayesian advances in network modeling, demography, model selection, and language change. The complete programme is here. You can register until just before the conference starts. Currently we still have enough room to accommodate a few…
read more