Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
The physicist Richard Feynman defined scientific honesty as: It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is … Read more
So my old nemesis the Bogus Lancet study of Iraqi casualties is showing up again here and there so I thought I would revisit it. What grabbed my attention this time around is the intentionally inconsistent use of the Falluja cluster data. The study produces radically different results depending on whether the Falluja data is … Read more
Consider the following hypotheticals: A friend ask you to build a bookcase to fit in a particular niche in his house. In the first case, the friend doesn’t really know the dimensions of the niche. He just says that it is a couple feet wide and about “this tall.” In the second case, he provides … Read more
I’ve read and heard some curious things in the post-election ether, and I’ve got an idea as to how we look and feel a month or three from now. Let me say for what it’s worth, that this idea comes from my gut, but I’ve learned that the gut is nothing if not an efficient … Read more
It occurs to me that many of those reading my criticism of the Lancet Iraqi-mortality study don’t know what cluster sampling is or what types of failure it is prone to.. Cluster Sampling works like this: Say you have 100 balls colored either black or white in an unknown ratio. Now, in a traditional random … Read more