QUOTE
Are you still debunking these days?
Yes, I still get calls. There are many ways that bad science happens -- one is outright fraud and tickery like Serios, another is bad statistics. An example of bad statistics is a book called The Bible Code, which has sold 3 million copies. It's by a bunch of mathematicians and rabbis who claim that you can use the book of Genesis and arithmetic progressions to predict the future. It is quite a complicated piece of mathematics, but the proof of it was basically statistical. It goes something like this: you take some phrase like "Persi Diaconis" and find the shortest progression in Genesis that spells it out. You can find anything, I promise you. Then you take some phrase that is related to the first phrase, like "shuffling cards", and you find the shortest progression that contains that. The book claims that these progressions are physically closer together than they would be by chance. They had some way of trying to quantify this that was just crazy. But you had to be a professional statistician to know.
Yes, I still get calls. There are many ways that bad science happens -- one is outright fraud and tickery like Serios, another is bad statistics. An example of bad statistics is a book called The Bible Code, which has sold 3 million copies. It's by a bunch of mathematicians and rabbis who claim that you can use the book of Genesis and arithmetic progressions to predict the future. It is quite a complicated piece of mathematics, but the proof of it was basically statistical. It goes something like this: you take some phrase like "Persi Diaconis" and find the shortest progression in Genesis that spells it out. You can find anything, I promise you. Then you take some phrase that is related to the first phrase, like "shuffling cards", and you find the shortest progression that contains that. The book claims that these progressions are physically closer together than they would be by chance. They had some way of trying to quantify this that was just crazy. But you had to be a professional statistician to know.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinio...a-lifetime.html:
Interview: The chance of a lifetime
24 March 2007
"Persi Diaconis is one of the world's top sleight-of-hand magicians and a professor of statistics at Stanford to boot. His journey was unique
When he ran away from home aged 14 to spend two years on the road as a magician's assistant, Persi Diaconis had little idea that his fascination with magic would take him to Harvard University and beyond. Today he is not only one of the world's top sleight-of-hand magicians but a professor of statistics at Stanford to boot. He has used his skills to debunk numerous instances of fraud and trickery, and proved that it takes seven shuffles to perfectly randomise a pack of cards. He tells Justin Mullins about his strange journey"
