statistics wars

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There was a very valuable panel discussion after my October 9 Neyman Seminar in the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley.  I want to respond to many of the questions put forward by the participants (Ben Recht, Philip Stark, Bin Yu, Snow Zhang)  that we did not address during that panel. Slides from my presentation, “Severity as a basic concept of philosophy of statistics” are at the end of this post (but with none of the animations). I begin in this post by responding to Ben Recht, a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Berkeley, and his recent blogpost, What is Statistics’ Purpose? On severe testing, regulation, and butter passing, on my talk. I will consider: (1) A complex or leading question; (2) Why I chose to focus about Neyman’s philosophy of statistics and (3) What the “100 years of fighting and browbeating” were/are all about. Continue reading →