Matt Blackwell at the Harvard Social Science Statistics Blog draws attention (in a most amusing way) to this interesting NY Times article. Worth a read. Basically, a professor with “a great sense of humour” (Daryl J. Bem) claims to have demonstrated pre-cognition/ESP. Is it a joke? Matt Blackwell says: “Want to see more discussion of null hypotheses and Bayesian analysis in the NYT?” Pleasing though it is to see it discussed, I strongly suspect that there’s more wrong with the paper than its reliance on classical (as opposed to Bayesian) statistics…
It’s worth confessing at this point that the Times article actually contains almost everything I know about Bayesian statistics. I am swimming in primordial statistical soup in this regard.