Monthly Archives: November 2016

3 YEARS AGO (NOVEMBER 2013): MEMORY LANE

Posted on November 28, 2016 by Mayo

3 years ago…

MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: November 2013. I mark in red three posts from each month that seem most apt for general background on key issues in this blog, excluding those reblogged recently[1], and in green up to 3 others I’d recommend[2]. Posts that are part of a “unit” or a group count as one. Here I’m counting 11/9, 11/13, and 11/16 as one

November 2013

(11/2) Oxford Gaol: Statistical Bogeymen
(11/4) Forthcoming paper on the strong likelihood principle
(11/9) Null Effects and Replication (cartoon pic)
(11/9) Beware of questionable front page articles warning you to beware of questionable front page articles (iii)
(11/13) T. Kepler: “Trouble with ‘Trouble at the Lab’?” (guest post)
(11/16) PhilStock: No-pain bull
(11/16) S. Stanley Young: More Trouble with ‘Trouble in the Lab’ (Guest post)
(11/18) Lucien Le Cam: “The Bayesians hold the Magic”
(11/20) Erich Lehmann: Statistician and Poet
(11/23) Probability that it is a statistical fluke [i]
(11/27) “The probability that it be a statistical fluke” [iia]
(11/30) Saturday night comedy at the “Bayesian Boy” diary (rejected post*)

[1] Monthly memory lanes began at the blog’s 3-year anniversary in Sept, 2014.

[2] New Rule, July 30, 2016-very convenient.

Save

Glymour at the PSA: “Exploratory Research is More Reliable Than Confirmatory Research”

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Mayo

I resume my comments on the contributions to our symposium on Philosophy of Statistics at the Philosophy of Science Association. My earlier comment was on Gerd Gigerenzer’s talk. I move on to Clark Glymour’s “Exploratory Research Is More Reliable Than Confirmatory Research.” His complete slides are after my comments.

GLYMOUR’S ARGUMENT (in a nutshell):

“The anti-exploration argument has everything backwards,” says Glymour (slide #11). While John Ioannidis maintains that “Research findings are more likely true in confirmatory designs,” the opposite is so, according to Glymour. (Ioannidis 2005, Glymour’s slide #6). Why? To answer this he describes an exploratory research account for causal search that he has been developing:

(slide #5)

What’s confirmatory research for Glymour? It’s moving directly from rejecting a null hypothesis with a low P-value to inferring a causal claim. Continue reading →

Categories: fallacy of rejection, P-values, replication research

Taking errors seriously in forecasting elections

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Mayo

Science isn’t about predicting one-off events like election results, but that doesn’t mean the way to make election forecasts scientific (which they should be) is to build “theories of voting.” A number of people have sent me articles on statistical aspects of the recent U.S. election, but I don’t have much to say and I like to keep my blog non-political. I won’t violate this rule in making a couple of comments on Faye Flam’s Nov. 11 article: “Why Science Couldn’t Predict a Trump Presidency”[i].

For many people, Donald Trump’s surprise election victory was a jolt to very idea that humans are rational creatures. It tore away the comfort of believing that science has rendered our world predictable. The upset led two New York Times reporters to question whether data science could be trusted in medicine and business. A Guardian columnist declared that big data works for physics but breaks down in the realm of human behavior. Continue reading →

Categories: Bayesian/frequentist, evidence-based policy

Gigerenzer at the PSA: “How Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, & Bayes Were Transformed into the Null Ritual”: Comments and Queries (ii)

Posted on November 8, 2016 by Mayo

Gerd Gigerenzer, Andrew Gelman, Clark Glymour and I took part in a very interesting symposium on Philosophy of Statistics at the Philosophy of Science Association last Friday. I jotted down lots of notes, but I’ll limit myself to brief reflections and queries on a small portion of each presentation in turn, starting with Gigerenzer’s “Surrogate Science: How Fisher, Neyman-Pearson, & Bayes Were Transformed into the Null Ritual.” His complete slides are below my comments. I may write this in stages, this being (i).

SLIDE #19

Good scientific practice–bold theories, double-blind experiments, minimizing measurement error, replication, etc.–became reduced in the social science to a surrogate: statistical significance.

I agree that “good scientific practice” isn’t some great big mystery, and that “bold theories, double-blind experiments, minimizing measurement error, replication, etc.” are central and interconnected keys to finding things out in error prone inquiry. Do the social sciences really teach that inquiry can be reduced to cookbook statistics? Or is it simply that, in some fields, carrying out surrogate science suffices to be a “success”? Continue reading →