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At least as apt today as 3 years ago…HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Memory Lane with new comments in blue.
In an earlier post I alleged that frequentist hypotheses tests often serve as whipping boys, by which I meant “scapegoats”, for the well-known misuses, abuses, and flagrant misinterpretations of tests (both simple Fisherian significance tests and Neyman-Pearson tests, although in different ways)—as well as for what really boils down to a field’s weaknesses in modeling, theorizing, experimentation, and data collection. Checking the history of this term however, there is a certain disanalogy with at least the original meaning of a “whipping boy,” namely, an innocent boy who was punished when a medieval prince misbehaved and was in need of discipline. It was thought that seeing an innocent companion, often a friend, beaten for his own transgressions would supply an effective way to ensure the prince would not repeat the same mistake. But significance tests floggings, rather than a tool for a humbled self-improvement and commitment to avoiding flagrant rule violations, has tended instead to yield declarations that it is the rules that are invalid! The violators are excused as not being able to help it! The situation is more akin to that of witch hunting that in some places became an occupation in its own right.
Now some early literature, e.g., Morrison and Henkel’s Significance Test Controversy (1962), performed an important service over fifty years ago. They alerted social scientists to the fallacies of significance tests: misidentifying a statistically significant difference with one of substantive importance, interpreting insignificant results as evidence for the null hypothesis—especially problematic with insensitive tests, and the like. Chastising social scientists for applying significance tests in slavish and unthinking ways, contributors call attention to a cluster of pitfalls and fallacies of testing. Continue reading
Error Statistics Philosophy 