Uncertainty and the perils of prediction with William M Briggs

<p>Economics Explained host Gene Tunny speaks with statistician William M “Matt” Briggs about uncertainty and the perils of prediction.</p><p>Matt is a consulting statistician and a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. He has been a visiting Professor of Statistics at Central Michigan University and an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the Cornell Medical School. Matt is the author of the 2016 book <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319397559#aboutBook" target="_blank">Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability and Statistics</a>, published by Springer.</p><p>In the interview I mention Matt’s article <a href="https://wmbriggs.com/post/18977/" target="_blank">Why is Economics plagued by Math?</a> This article by Matt refers to a 2015 paper by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer <a href="https://paulromer.net/mathiness/" target="_blank">Mathiness in the theory of economic growth</a>.</p><p>If you’re interested in learning more about Matt’s work, check out this video on YouTube:</p><p><a href="https://youtu.be/rbf_TXqEY-Y" target="_blank">The crisis of evidence, or why probability and statistics cannot discover cause</a></p><p>In my introductory remarks I quote from John Bohannon’s <i>Science Magazine</i> article: </p><p><a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/about-40-economics-experiments-fail-replication-survey" target="_blank">About 40% of economics experiments fail replication survey</a></p>