West Coast Stat Views (on Observational Epidemiology and more)

Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Clive James's example may be god-awful, but what about the point he was trying to make?

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 Picking up on our discussion of this claim: The best Hitchcock film was directed by someone else. Charade would not be as good as it is i...
3 comments:
Tuesday, March 4, 2025

A Blacker Black Box

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From Matt Levine's newsletter: There are two basic ways to use artificial intelligence to predict stock prices: You build a deep learn...
1 comment:
Monday, March 3, 2025

The Grandiosity/Contribution Ratio -- another newly relevant repost

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One of the recurring threads at the blog for years now has been the Lords of Ithuvania , the way we have collectively treated people who stu...
Friday, February 28, 2025

More thoughts on criticism -- critics and reviewers

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 Both reviewer and critic are honorable professions, with, if anything, the former being more valuable. The best reviewers by a wide margin ...
3 comments:
Thursday, February 27, 2025

Two completely unrelated news stories

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From the Arkansas Times: Bill deregulating raw dairy products passes Senate, heads to governor’s desk  by Phillip Powell A bill to deregulat...
Wednesday, February 26, 2025

"There seems to be a plague of jellyfish and really a plague of anything is usually not considered good."

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As previously mentioned ( "The city would naturally form a line as it tried to get away from itself." ), Patrick Boyle is one of t...
Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Thiel is Dr. Mabuse. Musk is Cobra Commander.

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From Josh Marshall: Against the backdrop of a month of chaos and destruction, something began to shift more or less in the middle of this w...
Monday, February 24, 2025

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LLM part 2 -- a proof-reader, not an editor

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I have two dictation options which, being a horrible typist, I use frequently. The first is Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my laptop, which wor...
2 comments:
Friday, February 21, 2025

"What was Clive James thinking?" Maybe the question is when was he thinking it?

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From Andrew Gelman : From The Dreaming Swimmer (1992), one of Clive James’s classic essay collections:     The best Hitchcock film was direc...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 20, 2025

In the cold war, all the cool kids had toys with nuclear warheads

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 And yes, the M65 atomic cannon was real. "Ideal Atomic Cannon" - 1958 Most people blame boomer cynicism and distrust of auth...
Wednesday, February 19, 2025

A tale of two tweets

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 This is Joseph. There is a new claim that the US is filled with vampires by Elon Musk, who is concerned about a database query of social se...
Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Fifteen years ago at the blog (does anyone else feel old?)

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My first degree was a BFA in creative writing. When asked why I was switching to statistics, I said I thought it would be easier to find mat...
Monday, February 17, 2025

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LLM part 1-- coding

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I used to ask, only half-jokingly, how any of us learned to code before Google.  I went to grad school in the mid-90s, so I'm old enough...
2 comments:
Friday, February 14, 2025

Listen to the last three minutes of Thursday's Marketplace

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Kai Ryssdal's closing statement is a template for how non-partisan mainstream journalists should frame this moment. Measured and object...
Thursday, February 13, 2025

In defense of LLMs, they are considerably more polite than the typical 9th grader

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 Andrew Gelman recently shared the following from Gary Smith : I [Smith] tested OpenAI o1, Copilot, and Gemini Flash, along with DeepSeek,...
4 comments:
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