Data science, Bayesian Statistics, and other ideas
A recent post claims that the “most statistically dominant athlete” of all time was cricketer Don Bradman. It’s a bold claim – let’s see if it holds up. In Chapter 4 of Probably Overthinking It, I listed a few examples of athletes who are considered the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT), and noted that in many cases they are not just a little better than the second-best, but much better. That is, they…
In 2016, Barack Obama gave a commencement address at Howard University, where he said If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into — you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the…
When I go crawling around in data from the General Social Survey, sooner or later I run into Ryan Burge, who writes Graphs About Religion. In his most recent post, he wrote about changes in interpersonal trust, as measured by this GSS question: Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people? Among other analyses, he looks…
Here’s a probability puzzle from a TED-Ed video called Can you solve the frog riddle? by Derek Abbott. It came up recently in this Reddit thread: You’re stranded in a rainforest after accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom. To survive the poison, you need to lick a certain species of frog. Only female frogs produce the antidote. Male and female frogs occur in equal numbers and look identical,…
This article is one of a series looking at changes in public opinion over the last 50 years, with a focus on culture war topics. In this installment, we’ll look at responses to four questions in the General Social Survey (GSS) related to sexual activity: As we’ll see, answers to these questions have diverged in the last 50 years. A large majority answer that extramarital and teen sex are wrong,…
This article is one of a series exploring responses to core questions in the General Social Survey (GSS), estimating period and cohort effects, and looking for historical events that might explain the trends we see. Confidence in American institutions In this installment, we’ll look at 13 questions related to confidence in institutions. We’ll start with a detailed look at confidence in “the people…
Yesterday I presented a talk at ODSC East 2026, called Counterfactual Analysis with Bayesian Models: What Drives the Life Expectancy Gap? Here s the abstract Across nearly every country in the world, women live longer than men—but the size of this gap varies from about two years in some countries to more than twelve in others. What explains these differences, and how much of the gap can be closed?…
In Graphs About Religion, Ryan Burge recently wrote about changing opinions about assisted suicide and how they relate to religion. As always, when I see survey responses changing over time, I wonder whether it is driven primarily by period or cohort effects. And if you’ve read my last few posts, you know I’ve been working on a Bayesian model to answer that question. Ryan’s analysis is based on…
In a previous article, I claimed that Young adults are not very happy. Now the World Happiness Report 2026 has confirmed that young people in North America and Western Europe are less happy than they were fifteen years ago, and less happy than previous generations. In this article, we’ll look at results from three related questions in the General Social Survey (GSS): As we’ll see, young adults in…
Someone asked me recently why I stopped writing about religion, and I said there were two reasons: One is that the primary dataset I was following stopped updating; the other is that Ryan Burge is doing such a good job, I felt redundant. His most recent article presents evidence that the Nones have hit a ceiling — that is, that the percentage of people in the U.S. with no religious affiliation,…