William M. Briggs

William M. Briggs. the Statistician to the Stars!, is a writer, philosopher and itinerant scientist living on a small but densely populated island in the Atlantic Ocean. He earned his PhD from Cornell University in statistics. He studies the philosophy of science, the use and misuses of uncertainty, the corruption of science, and the uselessness of most predictions. He began life as a cryptologist for the Air Force, slipped into weather and climate forecasting, and matured into an epistemologist.

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The Price of Panic

Jay W. Richards, Douglas Axe and William M. Briggs
December 8, 2020
The last months have been unlike anything we’ve ever seen, with extreme measures taken around the world to slow the spread of COVID-19. The policy of lockdowns and mass quarantines were widely adopted — but each passing day begs the question, did we take the right approach? COVID-19 is no doubt a real disease that should be taken seriously. But, our efforts to control it have come with high costs and unintended consequences. The government’s unprecedented strategy of halting the U.S. economy may have been well intentioned, but it has yielded lost businesses, broken dreams, and even death due to depression, addiction, other untreated diseases, and even starvation in some parts of the world. In this event and in their insightful book, The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of …