Blog name?

Just a quick post about the blog name. I had been searching for a name for over a year when I came up with this one while on a run on my 45th birthday (picture above is from that trail on that day). Critical Inference certainly doesn’t role of the tongue easily — and I almost cast it aside because of that. But then, I realized that is exactly the type of behavior we need to be pushing back against and is directly related to what I want to cover in this blog. The name captures what I want to convey — but it’s not simple or easy, and it takes some justification to make sense of. I shouldn’t shy away from it for those reasons — or apologize for it as I have found myself doing already — I just need to accept and embrace the extra work of justifying it to others. Here’s a visual conveying how the term came into my head that day:

Simply, we need to combine our critical thinking skills with our use of statistical inference in science and decision making. Statistical methods and results are not a substitute for critical thinking. And, it is not enough to say we teach and practice Statistical Inference and Statistical Thinking, and that we care about Critical Thinking. We must care more about what it takes to practice Critical Inference.