Seminar on History and Foundations of Probability and Statistics

Spring 2024
  • May 2, Kenny Easwaran (UC Irvine). Updating by maximizing expected accuracy in infinite non-partitional settings.
  • Feb 29, Krzysztof Mierzewski (CMU). Probing the qualitative-quantitative divide in probability logics.
  • Feb 15, Kevin Dorst (MIT). Good Guesses: The Conjunction Fallacy and the Tradeoff between Accuracy and Informativity.

    • Fall 2023
  • Nov 9, John Norton (Pittsburgh). Chance Combinatorics.
  • Oct 19, Glenn Shafer (Rutgers). One Way Testing by Betting Can Improve Data Analysis: Optional Continuation.
  • Oct 5, Jacob Barandes (Harvard). Probabilistic Systems and the Stochastic-Quantum Theorem.
  • Sept 28, Paolo Mancosu (Berkeley). Totality, Regularity, and Cardinality in Probability Theory.
  • Sept 21, David Bellhouse (Western University). The Flawed Genius of William Playfair.

    • Spring 2023
  • May 1, Anubav Vasudevan (Chicago). Entropy and Subjectivism.
  • Apr 24, Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD). Algorithmic Randomness and Probabilistic Laws (with Jeffrey A. Barrett, Irvine).
  • Apr 17, Kit Fine (NYU). Parity, Probability and Approximate Difference.
  • Apr 3, Michael Acre (UCSF). Why the Concept of Statistical Inference Is Incoherent, and Why We Still Love It.
  • Mar 27, Ezra Rubenstein (Berkeley). Probability from Symmetry.
  • Mar 20, Tessa Murthy (CMU). Von Mises, Popper, and the Cournot Principle.
  • Feb 27, Zachary Goodsell (USC). Symmetry of Value.
  • Jan 23, Boris Babic (Toronto). Inference, Optimal Stopping and New Hypotheses.

    • Fall 2022
  • Nov 28, Peter Grünwald (CWI/Amsterdam). Beyond Neyman-Pearson.
  • Oct 31, Marshall Abrams (Alabama). Bootstrapping Objective Probabilities for Evolutionary Biology.
  • Oct 3, Gordon Belot (U Michigan). That Does Not Compute: David Lewis on Credence and Chance.
  • Sept 19, Hartry Field (NYU). Bayesianism via Likelihood Theory.

    • Spring 2022
  • Apr 11, Francesco Orabona (Boston). Two Birds with One Coin: Convex Optimization and Confidence Sequences with Coin-Betting.
  • Apr 4, Michele Caprio (Duke). Extended probabilities and their application to statistical inference.
  • Mar 21, Sandy Zabell (Northwestern). Interpreting Carnap: Seven Decades Later.
  • Mar 7, Glenn Shafer (Rutgers), Dustin Lazarovici (Lausanne), Leah Henderson (Groningen), and Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD). Game-theoretic probability in physics.
  • Feb 28, Alex Meehan (Yale), Monique Jeanblanc (Evry), Barry Loewer (Rutgers), and Tahir Choulli (Alberta). Objective probability at different levels of knowledge.
  • Feb 14, Isaac Wilhelm (NUS), Ryan Martin (NC State), Alan Hájek (ANU), and Snow Xueyin Zhang (NYU). Cournot’s principle and the best-system interpretation of probability.
  • Feb 7, Marshall Abrams (Alabama), Ruobin Gong (Rutgers), Alistair Wilson (Birmingham), and Harry Crane (Rutgers). Are the repeated sampling principle and Cournot’s principle frequentist?
  • Jan 31, Philip Dawid (Cambridge), Ilya Shpitser (Johns Hopkins), Thomas Richardson (Washington), and Sylvia Wenmackers (KU Leuven). Are probability distributions for potential responses real and necessary for causal inference?
  • Jan 24, Jenann Ismael (Columbia), Itzhak Gilboa (Tel Aviv, HEC Paris), Stephen Senn (consultant), and Sherrilyn Roush (UCLA). Should decision theory guide the formulation of the principal principle?

    • Fall 2021
  • Dec 6, Kevin Blackwell (Bristol). Exploitability and accuracy.
  • Nov 29, Judith ter Schure (Leiden). ALL-IN meta-analysis.
  • Nov 22, Alexander Meehan (Yale). A framework for non-fundamental chance.
  • Nov 15, Isaac Wilhelm (NUS). The Typical Principle.
  • Nov 8, Ruobin Gong (Rutgers). Measuring severity in statistical inference.
  • Nov 1, Snow Xueyin Zhang (NYU). Borel and Bertrand.
  • Oct 18, Tze Leung Lai (Stanford). From domain-specific probability models to evaluation of model-based probability forecasts.
  • Oct 4, Marshall Abrams (Alabama). Pseudochance vs. true chance in complex systems.
  • Sept 20, Glenn Shafer (Rutgers). Descriptive probability.

    • The schedule for 2016-2021 is archived here.