2022 Syllabus

In the spring of 2022, I plan to try something new, something different, and something very odd for me; I will use someone else's material. Why? Richard McElreath wrote a wonderful book that introduces the logic of Bayesian thinking and moves people away from the nuts and bolts of the numerical methods. We will use his book and his video lectures. What will I do? I will work through the problems with each of you every week. We will watch the videos in our own time and I will provide some highlights of what you need to pay attention to in the book/videos in order to finish the problems that we work together on in class.

Regarding my prior attempts to teach Bayesian, I love the details but most students were not prepared for them and, as such, many left my class without a strong grasp of HOW to run Bayesian models. All my prior students knew WHY but not everyone understood the HOW. Richard's book is the first (well, maybe the second) that allows students to follow a simple logic in application. He uses concrete examples that may be readily ported to our field. We will follow along with his 2020 course even though he is currently teaching an online (flipped) course now in 2022. The outline below is rough and will change as we learn more about the workload for each of you.