Post-truth: a guide for the perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed

A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed

Preamble The meaning of “ethical” adopted here is one of being in accordance with the accepted rules or standards for right conduct that govern the practice of some profession. The professions we have in mind are statistics and the behavioral sciences, and the standards for ethical practice are what we try to instill in our students through the methodology courses we offer, with particular emph...

Entropy – A Guide for the Perplexed

Entropy is ubiquitous in physics, and it plays important roles in numerous other disciplines ranging from logic and statistics to biology and economics. However, a closer look reveals a complicated picture: entropy is defined differently in different contexts, and even within the same domain different notions of entropy are at work. Some of these are defined in terms of probabilities, others ar...

Understanding risk: a guide for the perplexed.

Over the course of the past decade, neurobiologists have become increasingly interested in concepts and models imported from economics. Terms such as "risk," "risk aversion," and "utility" have become commonplace in the neuroscientific literature as single-unit physiologists and human cognitive neuroscientists search for the biological correlates of economic theories of value and choice. Among ...

Interpretation of interactions: guide for the perplexed.

In this issue, Zammit et al explore how five dichotomised risk factors work together to predict risk for non-affective psychosis in a large Swedish cohort. In this editorial, we review these findings, and comment on both the nature of additive v. multiplicative models and the meaning of statistical interactions.