S3E9 – Statistical rethinking, with Richard McElreath

A reminder that David’s book, Solve Any Data Analysis Problem, is out later this year and you can already buy it and read it in its draft form as part of Manning’s Early Access Program. If you want to practise your data skills on real world problems and learn a reusable framework to use on any project in the future, this book is for you.

Find out more here: https://www.manning.com/books/solve-any-data-analysis-problem

Now onto today’s episode.

In this episode, we spoke to Richard McElreath.

Richard is an anthropologist focused on the role of culture in human evolution and adaptation. He is currently the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. A major focus of the department is integrating theory with data analysis and study design, and Richard spends much of his time supporting his colleagues in that way. He is the author of Statistical Rethinking, a popular Bayesian statistics textbook and video course.

We spoke to Richard about the state of scientific research, parallels between the problems in scientific research and doing data analysis in the business world, and to quote Richard, how, if we are very careful and try very hard, we might not completely mislead ourselves.

Richard’s departmental page: https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/richard-mcelreath
Richard’s blog: https://elevanth.org/blog
Richard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rlmcelreath