Recent quotes:

Uncertainty Is An Impossible Sell | William M. Briggs

f you want to set up business as a data scientist (the newfangled term by which statisticians are beginning to call themselves), the lesson is this: promise the moon and charge like you’re actually going there. Failure is rarely punished and never remembered. Uncertainty is the same tough sell in science. The way to do statistics (or machine learning, or AI, or whatever) properly, like I’m always saying, is to use whatever model you have to predict new, never-before-seen data. If your model works, you’ll make good predictions. If not, not. Problem is, this method is necessarily less certain than the old ways of doing things. Doing it the right way makes it look like you know a hell of a lot less.
#wmbriggs #uncertainty - wmbriggs.com

The IPCC’s And McKitrick’s “Hiatus” Time Series Models | William M. Briggs

Because the IPCC’s model said temperatures would be high these past eighteen or so years, when in reality the temperature bounced around but did nothing special, the IPCC has taken to calling reality a “pause” or “hiatus”. Everybody must understand that this “hiatus” is model-relative. It has nothing to do with reality. Reality doesn’t know squat about the IPCC’s model. The reality versus the model-relative “hiatus” is how we know the IPCC’s model stinks. If the IPCC’s model did not stink, it would have predicted the reality we saw. It did not predict it. Therefore the model stinks. The debate really is over.
#climate-change #wmbriggs #IPCC - wmbriggs.com