Juliet Shaffer and Erich Lehmann
Monday, April 16, is Jerzy Neyman’s birthday, but this post is not about Neyman (that comes later, I hope). But in thinking of Neyman, I’m reminded of Erich Lehmann, Neyman’s first student, and a promissory note I gave in a post on September 15, 2011. I wrote:
“One day (in 1997), I received a bulging, six-page, handwritten letter from him in tiny, extremely neat scrawl (and many more after that). …. I remember it contained two especially noteworthy pieces of information, one intriguing, the other quite surprising. The intriguing one (I’ll come back to the surprising one another time, if reminded) was this: He told me he was sitting in a very large room at an ASA meeting where they were shutting down the conference book display (or maybe they were setting it up), and on a very long, dark table sat just one book, all alone, shiny red. He said he wondered if it might be of interest to him! So he walked up to it…. It turned out to be my Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (1996, Chicago), which he reviewed soon after.”
But what about the “surprising one” that I was to come back to “if reminded”? (yes, one person did remind me last month). The surprising one is that Lehmann’s letter—this is his first letter to me– asked me to please read a paper by Frank Schmidt to appear in his wife Juliet Shaffer’s new (at the time) journal, Psychological Methods, as he wondered if I had any ideas as to what may be done to answer such criticisms of frequentist tests! But, clearly, few people could have been in a better position than Lehmann to “do something about” these arguments …hence my surprise. But I think he was reluctant…. Continue reading
Error Statistics Philosophy 