Pro Bono Statistics
Our Contributing Editor Yoram Gat responds to the article by Jeffrey Rosenthal in the previous issue. Yoram writes: The January/February 2021 issue of the Bulletin carried a column by Professor Jeffrey Rosenthal about the inaccurate predictions of pollsters regarding the outcomes of the November US presidential elections. Some statisticians saw…

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Contributing Editor Yoram Gat writes: The practice of sortition—appointing decision-making bodies via statistical sampling—has been gaining ground in recent years. Very recently, an allotted body has been convened by the French government to propose ways to deal with climate change. In Belgium, a permanent advisory body appointed by sortition has…

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Yoram Gat’s third column considers whether democracy would be better served by sortition: For about 2,500 years, statistical sampling was closely linked with democracy. “Selection by lot is natural to democracy, as that by choice [i.e., elections] is to aristocracy,” asserted Aristotle in the 4th century BC, following his own…

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Yoram Gat writes in his second column: I remember a few scattered comments by professors, which I heard or overheard as a graduate student and which gave a glimpse into the professors’ insights about learning. Maybe those comments stuck because they addressed a topic which I have so rarely heard…

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Yoram Gat, one of our new Contributing Editors, describes himself in his blog (also called Pro Bono Statistics) like this: “I am a statistician and software engineer, living in Israel. My interests include politics (theory and practice) and statistics (theory and practice).” Yoram said the inspiration for the title…

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