Legal Commentary

Inspired a few years ago from a piece I read of Christine Hurt's, I began using the Type I and Type II error jargon a lot, not only in my writing on punitive damages or punishment theory generally, but also in my teaching, particularly in the realm of criminal procedure rules related to adjudication (the bail to jail class). Since the last time I could be even plausibly described as competent with numbers and stats was about 11th grade, I was not surprised that many of my students and some colleagues exhibited some trouble keeping track which error was which. So, I'm grateful to Michael Heise, who pointed out this recent blog post from Ethan Fosse with mnemonics for keeping Type I errors differentiated from Type II errors:

first, a Type I error can be viewed as a "false alarm" while a Type II error as a "missed detection"; second, note that the phrase "false alarm" has fewer letters than "missed detection," and analogously the numeral 1 (for Type I error) is smaller than 2 (for Type I error)