#91 - The Uses and Abuses of Statistics (with Ben Recht)

Professor of electrical engineer and computer science Ben Recht joins us to defend Bayesianism, AI doom, and assure us that the statisticians have everything under control. Just kidding. Recht might be even more suspicious of these things than we are. What has statistics ever done for us, really? When was the last time YOU ran a clinical trial after all, huh? HUH? After Ben Chugg defends his life decision to do a PhD in statistics, we talk AI, cults, philosophy, Paul Meehl, and discuss Ben Recht's forthcoming book, The Irrational Decision (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691272443/the-irrational-decision). Check out Ben's blog (https://www.argmin.net/), website (https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/), and his story about machine learning (https://mlstory.org/). We discuss Ben Recht's theory of blogging Why is Berkeley the epicenter of AI doom? Where the word "robot" came from Is Bayesian reasoning responsible for AI doom? Paul Meehl and his contributions to science Ben Recht's bureaucratic theory of statistics What on earth is null hypothesis testing? What is the point of statistics? "Sweet spots" and "small worlds" Does science proceed by Popperian means? Can Popper get around the Duhem-Quine problem? Errata The z-score for the Pfizer trial was 20, not 12! References Argmin (https://www.argmin.net/), Ben Recht's blog David Freedman, UC Berkeley (https://statistics.berkeley.edu/about/biographies/david-freedman) Paul Meehl's online course (https://www.youtube.com/@michaelmcgovern8633/featured) Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the Slow Progress of Soft Psychology (https://errorstatistics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/meehl-1978.pdf), Paul Meehl's 1978 paper. Clinical versus statistical prediction: A theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-21565-000), by Meehl On the near impossibility of estimating the returns to advertising (https://ftp.zew.de/pub/zew-docs/veranstaltungen/ICT2013/Papers/ICT2013_Rao.pdf) A Bureaucratic Theory of Statistics (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03457) by Recht The new riddle of induction (https://fitelson.org/confirmation/goodman_1955.pdf) by Goodman Announcing the Irrational Decision (https://www.argmin.net/p/announcing-the-irrational-decision) Patterns, Predictions, and Actions (https://mlstory.org/), textbook by Ben Recht and Moritz Hardt Socials Follow us on Twitter at @BeenWrekt, @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link Become a patreon subscriber here (https://www.patreon.com/Increments). Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here (https://ko-fi.com/increments). Click dem like buttons on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ) What's Berkeley's next cult? Send your guess over to [e-mail] Special Guest: Ben Recht.