Carragee Consulting

The first lecture of 20 in Richard McElreath’s course, Statistical Rethinking, is introduces the metaphor of a clay Golem from Prague which is eventually destroyed by its creator — for statistical modeling, McElreath’s point is that whatever you create, no matter how powerful, it cannot think for you and so you had better hope to fully understand and control it.

Put differently, Statistical models without Process models, analysis without a fundamental understanding of context, are useless at best and most likely more dangerous than beneficial.

I love that this course starts our with a warning about the misuse of statistics with an example from evolutionary biology. It always makes me feel connected to my dad to learn both mythologies and anything related to evolutionary biology.

I’m looking forward to the coming weeks of learning to “Draw the Bayesian Owl” to break analysis into the request steps to:

• Understand what you are doing
• Document your work to reduce error
• Present a respectable, and replicable workflow which can be used to communicate your conclusions