stat activist watch 2023

One of the central roles I proposed for “stat activists” (after our recent workshop, The Statistics Wars and Their Casualties) is to critically scrutinize mistaken claims about leading statistical methods–especially when such claims are put forward as permissible viewpoints to help “the people” assess methods in an unbiased manner. The first act of 2023 under this umbrella concerns an article put forward as “statistics for the people” in a journal of radiation oncology. We are talking here about recommendations for analyzing data for treating cancer!  Put forward as a fair-minded, or at least an informative, comparison of Bayesian vs frequentist methods, I find it to be little more than an advertisement for subjective Bayesian methods in favor of a caricature of frequentist error statistical methods. The journal’s “statistics for the people” section would benefit from a full-blown article on frequentist error statistical methods–not just the letter of ours they recently published–but I’m grateful to Chowdhry and other colleagues who joined me in this effort. You will find our letter below, followed by the authors’ response. You can also find a link to their original “statistics for the people” article in the references. Let me admit right off that my criticisms are a bit stronger than my co-authors. Continue reading →