Noted for the record
One of the reasons statistics is difficult is the ‘availability heuristic’. That is, we estimate probabilities based on things we can remember, and it’s a lot easier to remember dramatic events than boring ones. It’s not just that correlation doesn’t imply causation; our perception of correlation doesn’t even imply correlation.
To help with availability, I’d like to make two boring and predictable observations about recent events.
1. This winter, despite the Icy Polar Blast™, was slightly warmer than the historical average, as forecast.
2. There wasn’t a major earthquake in ChCh in the last week of September, despite the position of the moon or the alignment of Uranus (or anything else round and irrelevant).
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »