I just read “Charlie Hustle: The rise and fall of Pete Rose and the last glory days of baseball,” by Keith O’Brien, and it gave me some insight into the logic of gambling addiction, along with a question. The insight—which is not a deep insight, or anything original with me, it’s just something that I realized after reading O’Brien’s book—is that...

Recently we’ve been talking a lot about election forecasting: Election prediction markets: What happens next? Why are we making probabilistic election forecasts? (and why don’t we put so much effort into them?) What’s gonna happen between now and November 5? Polling averages and political forecasts and what do you really think is gonna happen...

This is Jessica. I was thinking recently about how doing research on certain topics related to helping people improve their statistical practice (like data visualization, or open science) can seem to earn researchers a free pass where we might otherwise expect to see rigorous evaluation. For example, I’m sometimes surprised when I see researchers from...

Richard and I were working on the Bayesian Workflow book, I had an idea for an example to include and volunteered to write it up, and Richard suggested I “take a pass” on it. Then we realized that “take a pass” has two opposite meanings: “Do it” and “Skip it.” Which reminded me of something we discussed several years ago, that “sanction” is one of...

Rajiv Sethi discusses a recent ruling by a U.S. regulatory agency to halt trading on election prediction markets. Here’s Rajiv: As evidence for this assertion the agency cited some of my [Rajiv’s] writing [that] describe attempts at market manipulation, one for financial gain and the other seemingly for maintaining optimism about the prospects of...

Our first post was on 12 Oct 2004: A weblog for research in statistical modeling and applications, especially in social sciences; followed by The Electoral College favors voters in small states; Why it’s rational to vote; Bayes and Popper; and Overrepresentation of small states/provinces, and the USA Today effect. Later that month we had our first...