The Statistics Wars
and Their Casualties
22-23 September 2022
15:00-18:00 pm London Time*
ONLINE
(London School of Economics, CPNSS)
To register for the workshop,
please fill out the registration form here.
For schedules and updated details, please see the workshop webpage: phil-stat-wars.com.
*These will be sessions 1 & 2, there will be two more
online sessions (3 & 4) on December 1 & 8.
While the field of statistics has a long history of passionate foundational controversy, the last decade has, in many ways, been the most dramatic. Misuses of statistics, biasing selection effects, and high-powered methods of big-data analysis, have helped to make it easy to find impressive-looking but spurious results that fail to replicate. As the crisis of replication has spread beyond psychology and social sciences to biomedicine, genomics, machine learning and other fields, the need for critical appraisal of proposed reforms is growing. Many are welcome (transparency about data, eschewing mechanical uses of statistics); some are quite radical. The experts do not agree on the best ways to promote trustworthy results, and these disagreements often reflect philosophical battles–old and new– about the nature of inductive-statistical inference and the roles of probability in statistical inference and modeling. Intermingled in the controversies about evidence are competing social, political, and economic values. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence-policy reforms, they cannot scrutinize the consequences that affect them. What is at stake is a critical standpoint that we may increasingly be in danger of losing. Critically reflecting on proposed reforms and changing standards requires insights from statisticians, philosophers of science, psychologists, journal editors, economists and practitioners from across the natural and social sciences. This workshop will bring together these interdisciplinary insights–from speakers as well as attendees.
Speakers/Panellists:
Yoav Benjamini (Tel Aviv University), Alexander Bird (University of Cambridge), Mark Burgman (Imperial College London), Daniele Fanelli (London School of Economics and Political Science), Roman Frigg (London School of Economics and Political Science), Stephan Guttinger (University of Exeter), David Hand (Imperial College London), Margherita Harris (London School of Economics and Political Science), Christian Hennig (University of Bologna), Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology), Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech), Richard Morey (Cardiff University), Stephen Senn (Edinburgh, Scotland), Jon Williamson (University of Kent)
Sponsors/Affiliations:
The Foundation for the Study of Experimental Reasoning, Reliability, and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (E.R.R.O.R.S.); Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS), London School of Economics; Virginia Tech Department of Philosophy
Organizers: D. Mayo, R. Frigg and M. Harris
Logistician (chief logistics and contact person): Jean Miller
Executive Planning Committee: Y. Benjamini, D. Hand, D. Lakens, S. Senn
To register for the workshop,
please fill out the registration form here.
Error Statistics Philosophy 
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