[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…
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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…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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