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
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What's Berkeley's next cult? Send your guess over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com
Special Guest: Ben Recht.
