highly probable vs highly probed

continued…

Since the comments to my previous post are getting too long, I’m reblogging it here to make more room. I say that the issue raised by J. Berger and Sellke (1987) and Casella and R. Berger (1987) concerns evaluating the evidence in relation to a given hypothesis (using error probabilities). Given the information that this hypothesis H* was randomly selected from an urn with 99% true hypothesis, we wouldn’t say this gives a great deal of evidence for the truth of  H*, nor suppose that H* had thereby been well-tested. (H* might concern the existence of a standard model-like Higgs.) I think the issues about “science-wise error rates” and long-run performance in dichotomous, diagnostic screening should be taken up separately, but commentators can continue on this, if they wish (perhaps see this related post). Continue reading →

0. July 20, 2014: Some of the comments to this post reveal that using the word “fallacy” in my original title might have encouraged running together the current issue with the fallacy of transposing the conditional. Please see a newly added Section 7.

1. What you should ask…

Discussions of P-values in the Higgs discovery invariably recapitulate many of the familiar criticisms of P-values (some “howlers”, some not). When you hear the familiar refrain, “We all know that P-values overstate the evidence against the null hypothesis”, denying the P-value aptly measures evidence, what you should ask is:

“What do you mean by overstating the evidence against a hypothesis?”

Continue reading →