Top all-time · #1946
William M. Briggs
Personal blog · wmbriggs.comdatascience
William M. Briggs's personal blog at wmbriggs.com covers data and science. Since 2010, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “Top Reasons AI Will Never Become Superintelligence”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Statistician to the Stars!
Most-linked posts?
- Top Reasons AI Will Never Become Superintelligence2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-08
- Classical Statistics Has Outlived Its Usefulness: Here’s the Fix2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-04
- Use The Wrong P-value, Go To Jail2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-03
- Per capita federal spending since 1901 in constant dollars2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-24
- /post/30833/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-18
What Hacker News says?
Earlier today, a post linking to this article vanished: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/ . It was generating upvotes and discussion.
Comment linking /post/30833/
on “Google deletes “communist bandits” from comments on Youtube”Submitted Thorium Instead Of Uranium: Solution To Our Energy Woes? as a story · 76 points
HN discussion> I think there has been a very pernicious, detrimental focus in recent history on ensuring "happiness." Life is not about being happy. Communities do not exist to make people happy. I am familiar with the argument and you are free to think that, of course. My view is that happiness is our ultimate internal gauge. Any alternative to wanting to be happy is typically some form of religion (including some political ide…
Comment linking /blog/?p=7373
on “It’s time for Silicon Valley to ask: Is it worth it?”Submitted Machine Learning, Big Data, Data Mining, Statistics, Probability FAQ as a story · 71 points
HN discussionMalthus was right about what? He was wrong about nearly every single main hypothesis he made! What are you saying he got right? http://www.economist.com/node/11374623 http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=1837 Have you actually read Malthus' works?
Comment linking /blog/?p=1837
on “When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed”Submitted Lady Wins Fourth Lottery: What Are the Odds? as a story · 33 points
HN discussionLook how low the murder rate is in the United States right now. It's half of what it was in the 70-90's. http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/
Comment linking /post/5969/
on “De-Obfuscating the Statistics of Mass Shootings”Submitted Scientists Discover Way To Increase Publication Count as a story · 29 points
HN discussionThis is the kind of dishonest motte-and-bailey framing that is all too common in academia, that my post was trying to highlight. There are many aspects and fields of academia that are very obviously ideologically captured, whether that's "studies" in economics and sociology that are obvious attempts to reify the modern consensus of human beings as identical, fungible, latently-liberal economic units. Or it could be…
Comment linking /post/39160/
on “Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America (1995)”Submitted Lessons in statistics: How not to analyze time series as a story · 28 points
HN discussionNo, I am not committing the gambler's fallacy. Though I can see why you might think that. There are enough things that sound similar. I'm instead talking about a more subtle detail. Which is that selecting a group based on performance results in selecting people in part for having been lucky. They were lucky to have done that well that time, were lucky to be in your group, and their future performance probably won't…
Comment linking /post/63/
on “Mathematics as thought”Submitted On the Morality of Global Warming Criticism as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of the story summed up in this quote: There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one. Good enough source here: http://wmbriggs.com/post/18291/ Humans form a very high-dimensional space. I'm not sure what to make of the point about orthogonality in that regard.
Comment linking /post/18291/
on “Gaussian Distributions Are Soap Bubbles”Submitted How scientific group-think forms and grows as a story · 16 points
HN discussion> Trying to pin down a universal moral code is a fool's errand. Yeah, it is a complex subject. Philosophers talked about it for thousands of years, and I think they have not came to a definite conclusion yet. But on the topic of non absolute morality I like to compare it with a language. Lets for example take English. There are billions people who know English. Even I claim I know English, though I'm sure I'll fail…
Comment linking /post/18291/
on “How the CIA 'kidnapped' a Soviet moon probe during the space race”Submitted Classical Statistics Has Outlived Its Usefulness: Here’s the Fix as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThanks for pointing that out. Yes, it's hard to believe that someone with so much education (degrees in Statistics, Atmospheric Science, Meteorology, and Math) and so much professional experience (University Professor, Wall Street Quant, National Weather Service, US Air Force) would get that completely wrong. What do you figure the chances of that are? ;) http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?page_id=1085
Comment linking /blog/?page_id=1085
on “The press-release conviction of a biotech CEO and its impact on research”Submitted Classical Statistics Has Outlived Its Usefulness: Here’s the Fix as a story · 9 points
HN discussionHere's a statistician's take on this story: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=9308
Comment linking /blog/?p=9308
on “The press-release conviction of a biotech CEO and its impact on research”Submitted You do have something to hide as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis is a very interesting piece to read. The amazing thing to me is how smart people can look at the same evidence and come to very different conclusions. To get the feel of this piece, you really need to read it along with the comments. The author of the piece is a very talented statistician, with a PhD in Mathematical Statistics (I hesitate to think of what other kind of statistics someone might study?), a Master…
Comment linking /blog/?page_id=1085
on “Lessons in statistics: How not to analyze time series”Submitted Use The Wrong P-value, Go To Jail as a story · 8 points
HN discussionOne of the co-authors has been writing about this extensively. http://wmbriggs.com/post/15337/
Comment linking /post/15337/
on “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher”Submitted Take Burnham’s Test to See If You’re a Progressive as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBriggs responds: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5154 My experience is that usually in a contentious debate like this, the person who can keep a cooler head is right. It's not a perfect heuristic but it's a good starting point. Galileo can afford to be calm whereas Cardinal Bellarmine has to rant and rave.
Comment linking /blog/?p=5154
on “A case study of the tactics of climate change denial, in which I am the target”Submitted How to Fool Yourself -- And Others -- With Statistics as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt got ruined earlier than that. See "The Ph.D. Octopus", by William James, 1903. Or a more updated take on it that I just started reading: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/pfie.2013.11.5.... The B.S. Octopus, another article I just stumbled on: https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/140/
Comment linking /post/140/
on “Ask HN: I'm a DS, and I want to leave tech”Submitted Bad Statistics Is Now A Crime as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe linked article/statistics is this: https://wmbriggs.com/post/30833/ It might seem that the countries with no lockdown are doing better than those with lockdown from the graph alone. However, that interpretation is very biased and I want to repeat a trope: correlation is not causation. It is hinted that no lockdown has fewer deaths than lockdown "If anything, these are are clustered at the lower end of death rate…
Comment linking /post/30833/
on “a thread”Submitted Top Reasons AI Will Never Become Superintelligence as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
