Monthly Archives: March 2015

dirty hands

We constantly hear that procedures of inference are inescapably subjective because of the latitude of human judgment as it bears on the collection, modeling, and interpretation of data. But this is seriously equivocal: Being the product of a human subject is hardly the same as being subjective, at least not in the sense we are speaking of—that is, as a threat to objective knowledge. Are all these arguments about the allegedly inevitable subjectivity of statistical methodology rooted in equivocations? I argue that they are! [This post combines this one and this one, as part of our monthly “3 years ago” memory lane.]

“Argument from Discretion” (dirty hands)

Insofar as humans conduct science and draw inferences, it is obvious that human judgments and human measurements are involved. True enough, but too trivial an observation to help us distinguish among the different ways judgments should enter, and how, nevertheless, to avoid introducing bias and unwarranted inferences. The issue is not that a human is doing the measuring, but whether we can reliably use the thing being measured to find out about the world.

Remember the dirty-hands argument? In the early days of this blog (e.g., October 13, 16), I deliberately took up this argument as it arises in evidence-based policy because it offered a certain clarity that I knew we would need to come back to in considering general “arguments from discretion”. To abbreviate:

1. Numerous  human judgments go into specifying experiments, tests, and models.
2. Because there is latitude and discretion in these specifications, they are “subjective.”
3. Whether data are taken as evidence for a statistical hypothesis or model depends on these subjective methodological choices.
4. Therefore, statistical inference and modeling is invariably subjective, if only in part.

We can spot the fallacy in the argument much as we did in the dirty hands argument about evidence-based policy. It is true, for example, that by employing a very insensitive test for detecting a positive discrepancy d’ from a 0 null, that the test has low probability of finding statistical significance even if a discrepancy as large as d’ exists. But that doesn’t prevent us from determining, objectively, that an insignificant difference from that test fails to warrant inferring evidence of a discrepancy less than d’.

Test specifications may well be a matter of  personal interest and bias, but, given the choices made, whether or not an inference is warranted is not a matter of personal interest and bias. Setting up a test with low power against d’ might be a product of your desire not to find an effect for economic reasons, of insufficient funds to collect a larger sample, or of the inadvertent choice of a bureaucrat. Or ethical concerns may have entered. But none of this precludes our critical evaluation of what the resulting data do and do not indicate (about the question of interest). The critical task need not itself be a matter of economics, ethics, or what have you. Critical scrutiny of evidence reflects an interest all right—an interest in not being misled, an interest in finding out what the case is, and others of an epistemic nature. Continue reading →