Specificity and its cohort on statistical evidence

Reporting Under Pressure: Separating Factual and Tonal Sycophancy in LLM Statistical Analysis

Large language models are increasingly asked to analyze data and report what the results mean, a task distinct from the belief- or preference-alignment settings studied in most sycophancy research. We test whether editorial framing in the prompt, ranging from a neutral request to an explicit instruction to search exhau...

Coherence, charity and triangulation in statistical modelling

Bayesian statistics rests on a few familiar distinctions: frequentist vs. Bayesian, objective versus subjective probability, a model versus the data it is fitted to, a prior versus a posterior. Here, I use Donald Davidson's"third dogma of empiricism"to critique such distinctions in terms of scheme/content dualisms. Wit...

OF INTERNAL RISK

Empirical Bayesian analysis of dichotomic data with errors and repeated classifications

Conduits of confidence and doubt

Oreskes and Conway’s (2010) paradigmatic cases for agnotology show how misplaced doubt can be deliberately produced in the minds of one’s audience, even when everything one asserts is strictly true. This phenomenon is well captured by a Gricean framework that places stress on the ability to convey false implicatures vi...

Much Ado About 'N'othing

This article argues that a core area of the philosophy of biology—the philosophy of fitness—has for decades rested on fundamental conceptual and mathematical errors. These errors have been leveraged to support the position in the philosophy of biology known as statisticalism, which holds that biological fitness does no...