Continuations

Something that consistently surprises me is how many people have a fundamentally static worldview. Their motto appears to be: Things are as they are and nothing will change. Never mind that history is full of massive change. And even more surprising: once a huge change has occurred the new situation becomes the new accepted normal. The COVID19 crisis is case in point. The force of change, in the form of a virus that can be spread asymptomatically, was already clearly visible in January. The m...

In Uncertainty Wednesday I have talked a lot about the danger of doing statistics without a model. Another big danger is ignoring dynamic processes and conducting static analyses instead. That is you may have an explanation, such as “a person’s height is influenced by their genes” and you will wind up drawing very different conclusions if you take a static perspective. Here is a great chart from Our World in Data on the average height in three countries over time (a dynamic version available ...