The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

Herman Melville (1857): "The Confidence Man" This novel contains a multitude of people and aspects and elements and perspectives, and makes for good reading, but overall I found it to be not quite at the Moby-Dick level (a tall order). Since my methodological work in mathematical statistics sometimes touches on "confidence intervals" and "confidence methods" I note with interest and...more

Herman Melville (1857): "The Confidence Man" This novel contains a multitude of people and aspects and elements and perspectives, and makes for good reading, but overall I found it to be not quite at the Moby-Dick level (a tall order). Since my methodological work in mathematical statistics sometimes touches on "confidence intervals" and "confidence methods" I note with interest and fascination that a "confidence man" is the etymological root of "con man", i.e. a trickster who may fool you if you are not acutely alert. That puts an interesting twist on my confidence intervals and frequentist confidence distributions.   hide