Top all-time · #4555
Statistical Thinking
Personal blog · fharrell.comdatascience
Statistical Thinking is a personal blog at fharrell.com about data and science. Since 2017, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Damage Caused by Classification Accuracy”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-09, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Frank Harrell's Statistical Thinking blog for statistics writing, such as his critique of p-values and of a high-profile BMJ alcohol and brain study. One commenter calls his blog interesting.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Welcome to my blog! Here I write content about statistics, clinical trials, R, and much more.
Most-linked posts?
- Damage Caused by Classification Accuracy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-15
- Roadmap for choosing between statistical modeling and machine learning2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-01
- /post/pval-litany/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-11
What Hacker News says?
Frank Harrell writes a lot of great stuff and his answers on the Cross Validated Stack Exchange site are worth just reading even if you didn't think you wanted to ask the question they reply to. His blog, http://www.fharrell.com , also contains interesting posts.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?”Submitted Statistical Thinking: My Journey from Frequentist to Bayesian Statistics as a story · 225 points
HN discussion"Bayesian inference on the other hand is a specific type of statistical model where the aim is to model distributions, not just the output variable (which is what ML is traditionally focused on)." - What distribution are you referring to? One of the advantages of the Bayesian approach (in the context of models and not of probability, it is not a model, it is a way of estimating the values of the parameters of a mode…
Comment linking /post/stat-ml/
on “Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling”Submitted Statistical Thinking: A Litany of Problems with P-values as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAssuming of course that p-values are not problematic [1]: "The reign of the p-value is over: what alternative analyses could we employ to fill the power vacuum?" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.017... [2]: "A Litany of Problems With p-values" https://www.fharrell.com/post/pval-litany/
Comment linking /post/pval-litany/
on “Effects of acute wild blueberry supplementation on the cognition of children”Submitted Classification vs. Prediction as a story · 2 points
HN discussionLink to the study: http://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2353 PDF: http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/357/bmj.j2353.full.pdf Criticism by Frank Harrell: > A very high-profile paper was published in BMJ on 2017-06-06: Moderate alcohol consumption as risk factor for adverse brain outcomes and cognitive decline: longitudinal cohort study by Anya Topiwala et al. > The authors had a golden opportunity to estimate the dose-resp…
Comment linking /2017/04/statistical-errors-in-medica..
on “Even moderate drinking could harm the brain”Submitted Roadmap for choosing between statistical modeling and machine learning as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> A very high-profile paper was published in BMJ on 2017-06-06: Moderate alcohol consumption as risk factor for adverse brain outcomes and cognitive decline: longitudinal cohort study by Anya Topiwala et al. > The authors had a golden opportunity to estimate the dose-response relationship between amount of alcohol consumed and quantitative brain changes. Instead the authors squandered the data by doing analyzes that…
Comment linking /2017/04/statistical-errors-in-medical-literature.html
on “Even moderate drinking could harm the brain”Submitted Null Hypothesis Significance Testing Never Worked as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's not about revealing information, it's about how you model the problem. Say you're using logistic regression. If you upsample the minority class ( never downsample the majority class because that's statistically inadmissible), then your classifier might get better at modeling the decision boundary. However, that comes at the cost of losing the best part of logistic regression: probability prediction and calibrat…
Comment linking /post/classification/
on “Machine learning, concluded: Did no-code tools beat manual analysis?”Submitted How to Do Bad Biomarker Research as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSome relevant links: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00874-8 https://www.fharrell.com/post/pval-litany/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-significant-p...
Comment linking /post/pval-litany/
on “Research Papers That Caught the Public's Attention in 2019”Submitted How Does a Compound Symmetric Correlation Structure Translate to a Markov Model? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBoth the Brier score and log loss are proper scoring rules (i.e. optimized when the predicted probabilities are the true outcome probabilities), and the choice between the two seems to have minimal impact on the conclusions that can be drawn ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/deca.2013.028... ). I covered the Brier score in the post as I thought it would be easier to digest for a general audience. As F…
Comment linking /post/class-damage/
on “Making better decisions with the Brier score”Submitted Randomized Clinical Trials Do Not Mimic Clinical Practice as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLately, I've been enjoying a lot of posts in this blog right here: https://eugeneyan.com/writing My company just hired some new VPs from Amazon, and the writings in that blog convey a bit of the Amazon WOW. It's pretty insightful stuff. Also, many posts from Julia Evans :D More concretely, here are a few blog posts I go back to occasionally: https://doordash.engineering/2019/02/20/experiment-rigor-for... https://www…
Comment linking /post/stat-ml2/
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite technical blog posts?”Submitted Damage Caused by Classification Accuracy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Road Map for Choosing Between Statistical Modeling and Machine Learning as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Statistical Errors in the Medical Literature as a story · 1 points
HN discussion