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How can a discipline, central to science and to critical thinking, have two methodologies, two logics, two approaches that frequently give substantively different answers to the same problems? … Is complacency in the face of contradiction acceptable for a central discipline of science? (Donald Fraser 2011, p. 329)

We [statisticians] are not blameless … we have not made a concerted professional effort to provide the scientific world with a unified testing methodology. (J. Berger 2003, p. 4)

From the aerial perspective of a hot-air balloon, we may see contemporary statistics as a place of happy multiplicity: the wealth of computational ability allows for the application of countless methods, with little handwringing about foundations. Doesn’t this show we may have reached “the end of statistical foundations”? One might have thought so. Yet, descending close to a marshy wetland, and especially scratching a bit below the surface, reveals unease on all sides. The false dilemma between probabilism and long-run performance lets us get a handle on it. In fact, the Bayesian versus frequentist dispute arises as a dispute between probabilism and performance. This gets to my second reason for why the time is right to jump back into these debates: the “statistics wars” present new twists and turns. Rival tribes are more likely to live closer and in mixed neighborhoods since around the turn of the century. Yet, to the beginning student, it can appear as a jungle.

Statistics Debates: Bayesian versus Frequentist

These days there is less distance between Bayesians and frequentists, especially with the rise of objective [default] Bayesianism, and we may even be heading toward a coalition government. (Efron 2013, p. 145)

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I shall be concerned with the foundations of the subject. But in case it should be thought that this means I am not here strongly concerned with practical applications, let me say right away that confusion about the foundations of the subject is responsible, in my opinion, for much of the misuse of the statistics that one meets in fields of application such as medicine, psychology, sociology, economics, and so forth. (George Barnard 1985, p. 2)

While statistical science (as with other sciences) generally goes about its business without attending to its own foundations, implicit in every statistical methodology are core ideas that direct its principles, methods, and interpretations. I will call this its statistical philosophy. To tell what’s true about statistical inference, understanding the associated philosophy (or philosophies) is essential. Discussions of statistical foundations tend to focus on how to interpret probability, and much less on the overarching question of how probability ought to be used in inference. Assumptions about the latter lurk implicitly behind debates, but rarely get the limelight. If we put the spotlight on them, we see that there are two main philosophies about the roles of probability in statistical inference: We may dub them performance (in the long run) and probabilism. Continue reading →