Chance News 97

Quotations

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. --Oliver Cromwell

Cromwell's rule, named by statistician Dennis Lindley, states that the use of prior probabilities of 0 or 1 should be avoided, except when applied to statements that are logically true or false. For instance, Lindley would allow us to say that Pr(2+2 = 4) = 1, where Pr represents the probability. In other words, arithmetically, the number 2 added to the number 2 will certainly equal 4.

in: Cromwell's rule, from Wikipedia

Submitted by Paul Alper

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"[Choosing] what to do in the face of uncertainty is never a scientific question. The science is elucidating the possibilities and the probabilities but how to act and how to react is your own values. And we always have to make that explicit. But if you don’t have any information, it’s hard to know how to apply your values in more than a random way."

-- Stephen Schneider, quoted in Climate scientists, then and now, espousing ‘responsible advocacy’,
Dot Earth blog, New York Times, 20 December, 2013

Submitted by Bill Peterson

Forsooth

“The difference in mortality rates [in deaths per 100,000 women] between black women [top curve] and white women [bottom curve] with breast cancer has widened since 1975, in part because black women have not benefited as much from improvements in screening and treatment. Among the states with available data, Tennessee has the largest gap—with nearly 14 black women dying for every one white woman.”

in: A stark gap in breast cancer deaths (interactive graphic), New York Times, 20 December 2013

The phrase in bold appeared in the printed National Edition (p. A22) but was removed without comment from the online version by Dec. 24. None of the 162 online comments on the accompanying article questioned the phrase.

Submitted by Paul Campbell