SIST

1.4, 1.5

In Tour II of this first Excursion of Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (SIST, 2018, CUP),  I pull back the cover on disagreements between experts charged with restoring integrity to today’s statistical practice. Some advised me to wait until later (in the book) to get to this eye-opener. Granted, the full story involves some technical issues, but after many months, I think I arrived at a way to get to the heart of things informally (with a promise of more detailed retracing of steps later on). It was too important not to reveal right away that some of the most popular “reforms” fall down on the job even with respect to our most minimal principle of evidence (you don’t have evidence for a claim if little if anything has been done to probe the ways it can be flawed).  Continue reading →

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For the first time, I’m excerpting all of Excursion 1 Tour II from SIST (2018, CUP).

1.4 The Law of Likelihood and Error Statistics

If you want to understand what’s true about statistical inference, you should begin with what has long been a holy grail–to use probability to arrive at a type of logic of evidential support–and in the first instance you should look not at full-blown Bayesian probabilism, but at comparative accounts that sidestep prior probabilities in hypotheses. An intuitively plausible logic of comparative support was given by the philosopher Ian Hacking (1965)–the Law of Likelihood. Fortunately, the Museum of Statistics is organized by theme, and the Law of Likelihood and the related Likelihood Principle is a big one. Continue reading →