Statistical Inference as Severe Testing How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars

About this book

Mounting failures of replication in social and biological sciences give a new urgency to critically appraising proposed reforms. Statistical Inference as Severe Testing pulls back the cover on disagreements between experts charged with restoring integrity to science. It denies two pervasive views of the role of probability in inference: to assign degrees of belief, and to control error rates in a long run. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence reforms, they can't scrutinize the consequences that affect them (in personalized medicine, psychology, etc.). Statistical Inference as Severe Testing sets sail with a simple tool: If little has been done to rule out flaws in inferring a claim, then it has not passed a severe test. Many methods advocated by data experts do not stand up to severe scrutiny and are in tension with successful strategies for blocking or accounting for cherry picking and selective reporting. Through a series of excursions and exhibits, the philosophy and history of inductive inference come alive. Philosophical tools are put to work to solve problems about science and pseudoscience, induction and falsification.

Contents

Preface

Excursion 1. How to Tell What's True about Statistical Inference
Tour I. Beyond Probabilism and Performance
Tour II. Error Probing Tools vs. Logics of Evidence

Excursion 2. Taboos of Induction and Falsification
Tour I. Induction and Confirmation
Tour II. Falsification, Pseudoscience, Induction
Excursion 3. Statistical Tests and Scientific Inference
Tour I. Ingenious and Severe Tests
Tour II. It's The Methods, Stupid
Tour III. Capability and Severity: Deeper Concepts

Excursion 4. Objectivity and Auditing
Tour I. The Myth of “The Myth of Objectivity”
Tour II. Rejection Fallacies: Whose Exaggerating What?
Tour III. Auditing: Biasing Selection Effects & Randomization
Tour IV. More Auditing: Objectivity and Model Checking

Excursion 5. Power and Severity
Tour I. Power: Pre-data and Post-data
Tour II. How Not to Corrupt Power
Tour III. Deconstructing the N-P vs. Fisher Debates

Excursion 6. (Probabilist) Foundations Lost, (Probative) Foundations Found
Tour I. What Ever Happened to Bayesian Foundations?
Tour II. Pragmatic and Error Statistical Bayesians

Souvenir (Z) Farewell

References
Index

Customer Reviews