Monthly Archives: October 2018

Tour Guide Mementos (Excursion 1 Tour II of How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars)

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Mayo

Stat Museum

Excursion 1 Tour II: Error Probing Tools vs. Logics of Evidence 

Blurb. Core battles revolve around the relevance of a method’s error probabilities. What’s distinctive about the severe testing account is that it uses error probabilities evidentially: to assess how severely a claim has passed a test. Error control is necessary but not sufficient for severity. Logics of induction focus on the relationships between given data and hypotheses–so outcomes other than the one observed drop out. This is captured in the Likelihood Principle (LP). Tour II takes us to the crux of central wars in relation to the Law of Likelihood (LL) and Bayesian probabilism. (1.4) Hypotheses deliberately designed to accord with the data can result in minimal severity. The likelihoodist wishes to oust them via degrees of belief captured in prior probabilities. To the severe tester, such gambits directly alter the evidence by leading to inseverity. (1.5) Stopping rules: If a tester tries and tries again until significance is reached–optional stopping–significance will be attained erroneously with high probability. According to the LP, the stopping rule doesn’t alter evidence. The irrelevance of optional stopping is an asset for holders of the LP, it’s the opposite for a severe tester. The warring sides talk past each other. Continue reading →

Categories: SIST, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing | 1 Comment

A small amendment to Nuzzo’s tips for communicating p-values

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Mayo

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I’ve been asked if I agree with Regina Nuzzo’s recent note on p-values [i]. I don’t want to be nit-picky, but one very small addition to Nuzzo’s helpful tips for communicating statistical significance can make it a great deal more helpful. Here’s my friendly amendment. She writes: Continue reading →

Categories: P-values, science communication | 2 Comments

severe testing or severe sabotage? Christian Robert and the book slasher.

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Mayo

severe testing or severe sabotage? [not a book review]

 

I came across this anomaly on Christian Robert’s blog. 

Last week, I received this new book of Deborah Mayo, which I was looking forward reading and annotating!, but thrice alas, the book had been sabotaged: except for the preface and acknowledgements, the entire book is printed upside down [a minor issue since the entire book is concerned] and with some part of the text cut on each side [a few letters each time but enough to make reading a chore!]. I am thus waiting for a tested copy of the book to start reading it in earnest!

How bizarre, my book has been slashed with a knife, cruelly stabbing the page,letting words bleed out helter skelter. Some part of the text cut on each side? It wasn’t words with “Bayesian” in them was it? The only anomalous volume I’ve seen has a slightly crooked cover. Do you think it is the Book Slasher out for Halloween, or something more sinister? It’s a bit like serving the Michelin restaurant reviewer by dropping his meal on the floor, or accidentally causing a knife wound. I hope they remedy this quickly. (Talk about Neyman and quality control).

Readers: Feel free to use the comments to share you particular tale of woe in acquiring the book.

Categories: Statistical Inference as Severe Testing | 5 Comments

Tour Guide Mementos (Excursion 1, Tour I of How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars)

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Mayo

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Tour guides in your travels jot down Mementos and Keepsakes from each Tour[i] of my new book: Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (CUP 2018). Their scribblings, which may at times include details, at other times just a word or two, may be modified through the Tour, and in response to questions from travelers (so please check back). Since these are just mementos, they should not be seen as replacements for the more careful notions given in the journey (i.e., book) itself. Still, you’re apt to flesh out your notes in greater detail, so please share yours (along with errors you’re bound to spot), and we’ll create Meta-Mementos. Continue reading →

Categories: Error Statistics, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing | 8 Comments

Philosophy of Statistics & the Replication Crisis in Science: A philosophical intro to my book (slides)

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Mayo

a road through the jungle

In my talk yesterday at the Philosophy Department at Virginia Tech, I introduced my new book: Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (Cambridge 2018). I began with my preface (explaining the meaning of my title), and turned to the Statistics Wars, largely from Excursion 1 of the book. After the sum-up at the end, I snuck in an example from the replication crisis in psychology. Here are the slides.

 

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Excursion 2 Tour II (3rd stop): Falsification, Pseudoscience, Induction (2.3)

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Mayo

StatSci/PhilSci Museum

Where you are in the Journey*  We’ll move from the philosophical ground floor to connecting themes from other levels, from Popperian falsification to significance tests, and from Popper’s demarcation to current-day problems of pseudoscience and irreplication. An excerpt from our Museum Guide gives a broad-brush sketch of the first few sections of Tour II:

Karl Popper had a brilliant way to “solve” the problem of induction: Hume was right that enumerative induction is unjustified, but science is a matter of deductive falsification. Science was to be demarcated from pseudoscience according to whether its theories were testable and falsifiable. A hypothesis is deemed severely tested if it survives a stringent attempt to falsify it. Popper’s critics denied he could sustain this and still be a deductivist …

Popperian falsification is often seen as akin to Fisher’s view that “every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis” (1935a, p. 16). Though scientists often appeal to Popper, some critics of significance tests argue that they are used in decidedly non-Popperian ways. Tour II explores this controversy.

While Popper didn’t make good on his most winning slogans, he gives us many seminal launching-off points for improved accounts of falsification, corroboration, science versus pseudoscience, and the role of novel evidence and predesignation. These will let you revisit some thorny issues in today’s statistical crisis in science. Continue reading →

Categories: Statistical Inference as Severe Testing | 11 Comments

“It should never be true, though it is still often said, that the conclusions are no more accurate than the data on which they are based”

Posted on October 5, 2018 by Mayo

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My new book, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars,” you might have discovered, includes Souvenirs throughout (A-Z). But there are some highlights within sections that might be missed in the excerpts I’m posting. One such “keepsake” is a quote from Fisher at the very end of Section 2.1. 

These are some of the first clues we’ll be collecting on a wide difference between statistical inference as a deductive logic of probability, and an inductive testing account sought by the error statistician. When it comes to inductive learning, we want our inferences to go beyond the data: we want lift-off. To my knowledge, Fisher is the only other writer on statistical inference, aside from Peirce, to emphasize this distinction.

In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates. Rigour is needed to prevent the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. The conclusions are never more accurate than the data. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. It should never be true, though it is still often said, that the conclusions are no more accurate than the data on which they are based. (Fisher 1935b, p. 54)

How do you understand this remark of Fisher’s? (Please share your thoughts in the comments.) My interpretation, and its relation to the “lift-off” needed to warrant inductive inferences, is discussed in an earlier section, 1.2, posted here.   Here’s part of that. 

Continue reading →

Categories: induction, keepsakes from Stat Wars, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing | 7 Comments

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