psychology

The Social Dynamics of the R Core Team

August 12, 2012 | John Myles White

Recently a few members of R Core have indicated that part of what slows down the development of R as a language is that it has become increasingly difficult over the years to achieve consensus among the core developers of the language. Inspired by these claims, I decided to look ... [Read more...]

R as a cure for ‘mindless statistics’?

August 5, 2011 | expansed

Several years ago Gerd Gigerenzer wrote: “Statistical rituals largely eliminate statistical thinking in the social sciences. Rituals are indispensable for identification with social groups, but they should be the subject rather than the procedure of science. Statistical rituals largely eliminate … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Twitter Math Puzzle and Solution

July 7, 2011 | John Myles White

Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of ... [Read more...]

Speeding Up MLE Code in R

June 18, 2011 | John Myles White

Recently, I’ve been fitting some models from the behavioral economics literature to choice data. Most of these models amount to non-linear variants of logistic regression in which I want to infer the parameters of a utility function. Because several of these models aren’t widely used, I’ve had ... [Read more...]

R versus Matlab in Mathematical Psychology

February 20, 2011 | Jeromy Anglim

I recently attended the 2011 Australasian Mathematical Psychology Conference.This post summarises a few thoughts I had on the use of R, Matlab and othertools in mathematical psychology flowing from discussions with researchers atthe conference.I wanted...
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Inconsistencies in Bayesian Models of Decision-Making

January 20, 2011 | John Myles White

But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A ... [Read more...]

Academic Jargon: Field-Specific Insults

December 12, 2010 | John Myles White

Every academic field seems to develop a set of generic insults based on their intellectual toolkit. Here are two examples I hear often: Probabilists and Statisticians: “I think that’s an interesting case, but it’s in a set with measure zero.” Economists: “X group’s behavior is clearly rent-seeking.” ... [Read more...]
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