Media

MarketWatch op-eds

05.14.2025 What is AI really giving back to tech investors? Here's the hard truth

04.08.2025 Another Stock Market Crash? Don't Just Do something—Sit There

02.12.2025 The AI Castle in the Air

01.16.2025 Is Trump’s bitcoin embrace the biggest ‘pump-and-dump’ ever?

10.21.2024 The AI bubble is looking worse than the dot-com bubble

09.11.2024  AI-powered stock ETFs were hyped as superior investments. Then reality hit

08.01.2024 Big Tech's AI Bubble is Alive and Unwell

07.11.2024 America's Venture Capital System is Breaking Down—Taking Tech Startups With It

05.29.2024 AI Replicating Human Thinking is More Big Tech "Fake-It-Til-You-Make-It" Hype

03.04.2024 A Wile E. Coyote Moment for Venture-Backed Startups

01.22.2024 Monetarist Madness

12.12.2023 The Dodgers are Getting Shohei Ohtani for a Steal

11.28.2023 Here's what really matters when you buy stocks, real estate, and other investments

09.19.2023 Buying this annuity guarantees that you'll lose out on big money

08.07.2023 Startups are No Longer $100 bills on the Sidewalk

06.07.2023 Will ChatGPT and AI save money-losing tech companies from the short-sellers?

05.10.2023 Life Insurance Premiums are a Wealth Killer

03.20.2023 Inside SVB’s bankruptcy: startup company losses have threatened the financial system for years

03.13.2023 Prevent-defense” may work in football, but playing it safe isn’t a game winner for retirement investors

03.10.2023 Silicon Valley Bank survived the dot-com crash and the Great Recession, but SVB met its match in Powell’s hawkish Fed 

02.27.2023 AI stocks are the new dot-coms

11.29.2022 More Risk Doesn't Always Mean Greater Reward

09.29.2022 Rate hikes are spooking the market, but stock investors are focusing on the wrong rate

09.14.2022 Which Company Will Be the Biggest Unicorn Failure Ever?

09.08.2022 This Ain't No Bubble

08.11.2022 Real Profits, Not False Prophets

07.08.2022 If You Buy the S&P 500 Index Now, There is Only a 4% Chance that You are Paying Too Much

06.13.2022 Delivery Drones, Robotaxis, Even Insurance—Wildly Hyped Dreams for AI Startups are Giving Tech Investors Nightmares

05.05.2022 Once Richly Valued, "Unicorn" startups are Being Gored and Investors Have Stopped Believing

04.08.2022 Stock Buybacks are Washington's Latest Public Enemy

03.07.2022 "Fake it Till You Make it" is an Old Trick for Silicon Valley Startups

10.25.2021 AirBnb, Snap, Lyft and Uber are Just a Handful of the Debt-Ridden, Money-Losig Unicorn Stocks

 09.21.2021 In 2017 I wrote that U.S. Stocks Were Not Overpriced. That's Still True

08.17.2021 Bullish Optimism Boosting "Unicorn" Stocks is more like Delirium

01.18.2020 Apple Dividends

08.15.2019 Buy Stocks Because You Believe in the U.S., not a Trump Bump

07.27.2019 Bitcoin Bubble 2.0

11.19.2018 Bitcoin Babble

07.02.2018 Apple Still Okay at $200

06.21.2018 Curse of the Dow

06.20.2018 Good to Great

06.14.2018 Great to Good

06.04.2018 Money Machine, Not Slot Machine

05.25.2018 You Probably Have Too Little Invested in Stocks

05.07.2018 Apple Stock Buyback

03.28.2018 Stocks & Interest Rates

03.13.2018 Best Month to Buy Stocks

03.05.2018 Stock Market Indicators

02.09.2018 Don't Lock in Losses

01.04.2018 Bitcoin Could Have Been

12.31.2017 The Bitcoin Bubble

11.06.2017 Apple Could Become Even Better as its Growth Slows

10.29.2017 Take Advantage of Mr. Market

09.26.2017 Good News for Value Investors

08.31.2017 Black-Box Investing

08.21.2017 Stocks Still Attractive—Compared to Bonds

RealClearMarkets op-eds

08.07.2023 Be Wary of Applying Shiller's CAPE to Individual Stocks

02.09.2023 Apple Remains a Good Long-Term Buy

12.13.2017 The Bitcoin Mania Will End Badly

08.31.2017 The Limits of Black Box Investing

08.21.2017 Gold is No More an Investment than are Beanie Babies

08.03.2017 Buying Collectibles is Not Investing

07.20.2017 What Do Interest Rates Have to Do with Stock Prices?

07.06.2017 Stocks Still Don't Look Expensive

06.14.2017 Today's Market is No 90's Bubble

Mind Matters op-eds

05.28.2025  LLMs are Bad at Good Things, Good at Bad Things

05.09.2025  Yes, Large Language Models May Soon be Smarter than Humans

04.21.2025  LLMs Still Cannot be Trusted for Financial Advice

04.14.2025  LLMs: A Lack-of-Progress Report

04.08.2025  Without a Theory, a Pattern is Just a Pattern

03.31.2025  Yes, the AI Stock Bubble is a Bubble

03.06.2025  Why LLMs Are Not Boosting Productivity

03.03.2025  Intelligence is More Than Following Instructions

02.24.2025  The Large Language Model (LLM) "Superpower" illusion Dies Hard

02.20.2025  Why LLMs Won't Lead to Artificial General Intelligence

01.30.2025  Some Lessons From DeepSeek

01.17.2025  Sloppy Science Is a Statistical Sin

01.16.2025 AGI Is Not Nearly Here 

01.06.2025 Large Language Models (LLMs) Flunk Word Game Connections 

12.05.2024  The Promise of Artificial General Intelligence is Evaporating

11.15.2024 Do Fantasy Sports Tell Us Something About Artificial Intelligence?

10.22.2024 The World Series of Coin Flips

10.08.2024 P-hacking: The Perils of Presidential Election Models

10.07.2024  Presidential Pundits—a P-Hacking Parable

08.29.2024  A Sloppy "AI Scientist" could make the scence crisis much worse

08.21.2024 Bad luck seldom persists — but it never guarantees good luck

08.16.2024 What The Luck? How Luck Matters to Olympics and Baseball

08.09.2024 The Reinhart/Rogoff 90% government-debt tipping point is nonsense

07.22.2024 Imprudent Prudence: Is failure okay when everyone is failing?

06.27.2024 AI is Still a Delusion

05.15.2024 A Man, A Boat, and a Goat

04.16.2024 Elon Musk: AI Will be Smarter Than a Human in 2025: Why He's Wrong

04.11.2024 The AI Hype Machine Just Rolls on, Living on Exhaust

03.20.2024 The Flea Market of the Internet

02.23.2024 Retracted paper is a compelling case for reform

02.21.2024  Why chatbots (LLMs) flunk Grade 9 math tests

01.15.2024 Internet Pollution—If You Tell a Lie Long Enough...

01.09.2024 Computers Still Do Not Understand

01.08.2024 When it Comes to New Technologies Like AI, Tempers Run Hot

01.02.2024 Let's Dispose of Exploding Pie Charts

12.15.2023 Large Language Models are Still Smoke and Mirrors

11.10.2023 Computers May Know How But They Still Don't Know Why

11.08.2023 LLMs are Still Faux Intelligence

11.06.2023 A Modest Proposal to Save MLB

10.27.2023 The MLB Coin-Flipping Contest

10.23.2023 Blue Zone BS: The Longevity Cluster Myth

09.25.2023 Confusing Correlation with Causation

08.10.2023 The LK-99 BS Further Undermines the Credibility of Science

07.31.2023 Sabrina Ionescu's Hot Hand

07.21.2023 Using Data Like a Drunk Uses a Lamppost

06.12.2023 The LLM Deep Fake — Follow the Money

05.15.2023 The Death of Peer Review?

04.24.2023 A World Without Work? Here We go Again

03.31.2023 An Illusion of Emergence Part 2

03.27.2023 A Graph Can Tell a Story—Sometimes it’s an Illusion

03.06.2023 Learning to write and speak, writing and speaking to learn

03.01.2023 Text Generators, Education, and Critical Thinking: an Update

02.27.2023 Let's take the "I" out of AI

01.30.2023 Goodhart’s Law and Scientific Innovation in Academia

01.16.2023 Language Models Can Entertain but Are They Useful?

12.19.2022 Large Language Models are an Unfortunate Detour in AI

11.16.2022 Has the Bitcoin Supply of Greater Fools Finally Been Exhausted?

11.09.2022 This Time, Houston Was Blessed by More than Stolen Signs

10.31.2022 Education in the Age of AI

10.17.2022 Mindless Math

10.04.2022 The Hyperspecialization of University Researchers

09.19.2022 Step Away From Stepwise and Other Data-Mining Sinkholes

09.05.2022 Don't Worship Math: Numbers Don't Equal Insight

07.19.2022 Big Brother is Watching You (and Trying to Read Your Mind)

07.15.2022 We Love Baseball Because of—not in Spite of—Lady Luck

07.11.2022 Would AI Run the World Better Than Humans? Not Yet

07.06.2022 Can AI Really Predict Crime a Week in Advance? That's the Claim

06.13.2022 AI: Is Thinking Humany More Important than Acting Rationally?

05.25.2022 Some economic models are alluring, others are useful

05.11.2022 Turing Tests are Terribly Misleading

05.03.2022 Will Higher Prices Disarm Russia? It's Complicated

03.21.2022 The AI Illusion

03.16.2022 The Trump Coin Scam

02.28.2022 Detecting BS Research: If it seems to Good to be True, ...

02.23.2022 The Brady Bunch: Why Research Should be Guided by Common Sense

02.15.2022 Fool's Gold: Even AI Successes Can be Failures

01.31.2022 Get Your 8 (or 5?) Hours of Sleep

01.03.2022 Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years

12.21.2021 The Cult of Statistical Significance—and the Neglect of Oomph

12.01.2021 Zillow's House-Flipping Misadventure

11.23.2021 Fake it 'Til You Make It—The Power Pose Parable Part II

11.22.2021 Fake it 'Til You Make It—The Power Pose Parable Part I

10.25.2021 Destructing the Creative Destruction Myth

09.20.2021 COVID-19, Bayes' Rule, and Simpson's Paradox

08.16.2021 Insurance Company Gives Sour Promises

08.02.2021 An Epic Failure: Overstated Claims in Medicine

07.29.2021 The Word "AI" Has Become a Marketing Ploy

07.13.2021 Using Benford's Law to Detect Bitcoin Manipulation

06.30.2021 The Great American Novel Will Not be Written by a Computer

06.17.2021 A Vulnerable System: Fake Papers and Imaginary Scientists

06.15.2021 Gaming the System: The Flaws in Peer Review

06.14.2021 Publish or Perish—Another Example of Goodhart's Law

05.26.2021 A World Without Work? Don't Hold Your Breath

04.15.2021 Exercise is Medicine

04.09.2021 Artificial Unintelligence

03.29.2021 Doctors Won't Be Obsolete Anytime Soon

03.08.2021 Spot and Choose: Fair Play is Uniquely Human

02.15.2021The Illuminati and How Science Now Fuels Anti-Science

02.01.2021 Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble—Here We Go Again

01.25.2021 Will Mediocrity Triumph? The Fallacy that Will Not Die

01.04.2021 Steph Curry Got Red Hot—and Torched the Hot Hand Fallacy

12.27.2020 AI: Still just curve fitting, not finding a Theory of Everything

12.23.2020 The British Medical Journal's Top Picks in Offbeat Medical Science

12.21.2020 Torturing Data Can Destroy a Career: The Case of Brian Wansink

11.23.2020 The wisdom of crowds: Are crowds really wiser than individuals?

11.09.2020 Cancer maps—an expensive source of phantom patterns?

10.26.2020 It’s Hard to Estimate the Highly Improbable

10.12.2020 The Decline Effect: Most Medicines Disappoint

09.24.2020 Why Intelligent Women Marry Less Intelligent Men

09.14.2020 Computers Excel at Finding Temporary Patterns

08.28.2020 The Stock Market Keeps Rising Despite COVID. Is it Nuts?

08.19.2020 The A-Level Scandal

08.17.2020 Science is More than Data Clusters

08.16.2020 Female Hurricanes: A Hot Air Zombie Study

08.03.2020 Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas

07.13.2020 Election Models: Predicting the Past is Easy and Useless

07.07.2020 Stocks Are Not a Ponzi Scheme

06.29.2020 Inflation is the Least of Our Worries

06.01.2020 The Birds Aren't Real

05.19.2020 What Do Economists Do?

05.14.2020 Vitamin D and COVID-19: Is it Data or Noise?

05.11.2020 Data Mining: A Plague, Not a Cure

04.15.2020 The Stock Market: Gains, Pains, and Panics

03.25.2020 Is Chloroquine Really a COVID-19 "Game Changer"?

03.03.2020 Stanford's AI Index Report: How Much is BS?

02.14.2020 Is Hot Hands Just a Basketball Myth?

02.03.2020 Ransacking Data for Hidden Treasures Seldom Ends Well

01.20.2020 Why Shuffle the Deck 7 Times?

01.06.2020 Serious Investors Should Embrace Stock Market Algos

12.16.2019 Bitcoin is a Classic Bubble Investment

11.20.2019 Your Computer is an Autistic Savant

11.17.2019 Investors, AI Isn't Your Big Fix

10.22.2019 The World Series: What the Luck?

10.07.2019 Love Math and Computers? Love Can be Blind

10.01.2019 A BABY, a GEEK, and a COW

09.30.2019 Computers' Stupidity Makes Them Dangerous

08.16.2019 7-Eleven Babies

08.12.2019 The Paradox of Luck and Skill

Reviews

11.20.2023 Notices of the American Mathematical Society: Distrust

07.09.2023 Thomas Lumley: Distrust

06.XX.2023 Rigaku: Distrust

06.14.2023 MindMatters: Distrust

06.14.2023 Social Science Journal: Distrust

06.07.2023 Popular Science: Distrust

05.23.2023 Keith Raymond Harris: Distrust

05.23.2023 W. A. Gardner: Critic and Skeptic

05.22.2023 Nature: Distrust

04.25.2023 Retraction Watch: Distrust excerpt

04.11.2023 David Wineberg: Distrust

03.23.2023 Washington Post: Distrust

03.23.2023 Campaign for the American Reader: Distrust

03.23.2023 Engineering & Technology: Distrust

03.23.2023 Library Journal: Distrust

02.03.2023 The American Statistician: Phantom Pattern Problem

09.02.2021 MarketPlace: A Market for Cute Ticker Symbols

08.XX.2021 Robotic and Cognitive Automation: The AI Delusion

02.17.2021 Metascience: The Phantom Pattern Problem

01.25.2021 Bloomberg Businessweek on Steph Curry's 105-shot streak

12.23.2020 Phantom Patterns selected by David Auerbach as one of the top books of 2020

10.30.2020 Social Science Journal: The AI Delusion

08.10.2020 The American Statistician: 9 Pitfalls of Data Science

11.06.2019 Keith Law: review of Standard Deviations

10.26.2019 Telegraph: Overblown Claims, PR Stunts, and Dumb AI

10.07.2019 Economist article on clever tickers

10.01.2019 CNBC article on clever tickers

09.06.2019 City Journal review of AI Delusion

06.02.2019 Floris iL review of AI Delusion

04.23.2019 ING/Datatech: Data Mining absurde resultater

12.06.2018 NBC Think: Is AI Dangerous?

10.17.2018 Daily Star: Robots Thinking Like Humans

10.01.2018 Popular Science review of AI Delusion

05.14.2018 Quantamize Book of the Week: Standard Deviations

04.15.2017 New York Times review of Money Machine

11.15.2016 The Motley Fool: Catchy Symbol, Stronger Stock?

11.15.2016 The Motley Fool: The Most Admired Beat the Market

10.04.2016 Manhattan Book Review: What the Luck?

10.19.2016 The Week: Luck is Real

08.12.2016 Dual Momentum review of Standard Deviations

07.15.2016 Kirkus Starred Review: What the Luck?

04.26.2016 Patt Morrison: Celebrity Deaths

04.26.2016 Patt Morrison: Statistics Mythbuster

04.26.2016 Modern Machine Shop Review of AI Delusion

11.10.2015 Huffington Post review of Standard Deviations

08.16.2015 MathTango review of Standard Deviations

05.20.2015 Kirkus Starred Review: Standard Deviations

01.19.2015 SF2 Concatenation review of AI Delusion

12.11.2014 FifthEstate review of Standard Deviations

11.28.2014 Wired UK article on massaging statistics

09.24.2014 BookBag review of Standard Deviations

09.08.2014 LA Weekly Review of Standard Deviations

09.01.2014 Scientific American article on survivor bias

11.04.2008 CNBC: How to Calculate a Home's Value

08.23.2008 Los Angeles Times: Houseonomics book review

08.17.2008 Chicago Tribune: Pick Your Spots When Remodeling

08.03.2008 Los Angeles Times: Should You Buy a Home Now?

07.01.2008 MarketWatch: Tips for Homebuyers

05.20.2006 Forbes: Your Castle's P/E Ratio

04.01.2006 New York Times: New Math on Homes

04.01.2006 New York Times: Calculating What To Pay for a Home

08.13.2005 New York Times:  Assess Your Area’s Real Estate Bubble

06.13.2004 Bloomberg: Your Home By the Numbers

06.02.2004 Science News Online: Death Waits for No One

06.15.2003 Bloomberg: A Home Buyer's Froth Detector

05.30.2002 MoneyCentral: Follow the Pendulum to Avoid the Pits

01.21.2002 Sports Illustrated: That Old Black Magic