Just as in the past 8 years since I’ve been blogging, I revisit that spot in the road at 9p.m., just outside the Elbar Room, look to get into a strange-looking taxi, to head to “Midnight With Birnbaum”. (The pic on the left is the only blurry image I have of the club I’m taken to.) I wonder if the car will come for me this year, as I wait out in the cold, now that Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (STINT 2018) has been out over a year. STINT doesn’t rehearse the argument from my Birnbaum article, but there’s much in it that I’d like to discuss with him. The (Strong) Likelihood Principle–whether or not it is named–remains at the heart of many of the criticisms of Neyman-Pearson (N-P) statistics (and cognate methods). 2019 was the 61th birthday of Cox’s “weighing machine” example, which was the basis of Birnbaum’s attempted proof. Yet as Birnbaum insisted, the “confidence concept” is the “one rock in a shifting scene” of statistical foundations, insofar as there’s interest in controlling the frequency of erroneous interpretations of data. (See my rejoinder.) Birnbaum bemoaned the lack of an explicit evidential interpretation of N-P methods. Maybe in 2020? Anyway, the cab is finally here…the rest is live. Happy New Year! Continue reading
Monthly Archives: December 2019
Midnight With Birnbaum (Happy New Year 2019)!
A Perfect Time to Binge Read the (Strong) Likelihood Principle
An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist notions: p-values, significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution (hence the term sampling theory, or my preferred error statistics, as we get error probabilities from the sampling distribution). This feature results in violations of a principle known as the strong likelihood principle (SLP). To state the SLP roughly, it asserts that all the evidential import in the data (for parametric inference within a model) resides in the likelihoods. If accepted, it would render error probabilities irrelevant post data. Continue reading
Cox’s (1958) Chestnut: You shouldn’t get credit (or blame) for something you didn’t do
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Just as you regularly keep up your physical exercise during the pandemic (sure), you also want to keep up with brain exercise. Given we’re just a few days from New Year’s eve, and given especially that on January 7 I will attempt (for the first time) a highly informal presentation of a controversial result in statistical foundations), here’s a little 2018 marked 60 years since the famous weighing machine example from Sir David Cox (1958)[1]. it is now 61. It’s one of the “chestnuts” in the exhibits of “chestnuts and howlers” in Excursion 3 (Tour II) of my (still) new book Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (SIST, 2018). It’s especially relevant to take this up now, just before we leave 2019, for reasons that will be revealed over the next day or two. For a sneak preview of those reasons, see the “note to the reader” at the end of this post. So, let’s go back to it, with an excerpt from SIST (pp. 170-173). Continue reading
Posts of Christmas Past (1): 13 howlers of significance tests (and how to avoid them)
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I’m reblogging a post from Christmas past–exactly 7 years ago. Guess what I gave as the number 1 (of 13) howler well-worn criticism of statistical significance tests, haunting us back in 2012–all of which are put to rest in Mayo and Spanos 2011? Yes, it’s the frightening allegation that statistical significance tests forbid using any background knowledge! The researcher is imagined to start with a “blank slate” in each inquiry (no memories of fallacies past), and then unthinkingly apply a purely formal, automatic, accept-reject machine. What’s newly frightening (in 2019) is the credulity with which this apparition is now being met (by some). I make some new remarks below the post from Christmas past:
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“Les stats, c’est moi”: We take that step here! (Adopt our fav word or phil stat!)(iii)
les stats, c’est moi
When it comes to the statistics wars, leaders of rival tribes sometimes sound as if they believed “les stats, c’est moi”. [1]. So, rather than say they would like to supplement some well-known tenets (e.g., “a statistically significant effect may not be substantively important”) with a new rule that advances their particular preferred language or statistical philosophy, they may simply blurt out: “we take that step here!” followed by whatever rule of language or statistical philosophy they happen to prefer (as if they have just added the new rule to the existing, uncontested tenets). Karan Kefadar, in her last official (December) report as President of the American Statistical Association (ASA), expresses her determination to call out this problem at the ASA itself. (She raised it first in her June article, discussed in my last post.) Continue reading
The Statistics Wars & Their Casualties
LSE PH500 Research Seminar (May 21-June 25, 2020): Controversies in Phil Stat
Summer Seminar 2019 (article)
Experts convene to explore new philosophy of statistics field
Error Statistics Philosophy 