Tag Archives: statistical inference

David Salsburg quote.Lars P. Syll’s BlogOn the applicability of statistics in social sciences Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

When giving courses in the philosophy of science yours truly has often had David Papineau’s book Philosophical Devices (OUP 2012) on the reading list. Overall it is a good introduction to many of the instruments used when performing methodological and science theoretical analyses of economic and other social sciences issues. Unfortunately, the book has also fallen prey to the randomization hype that scourges sciences nowadays.... Lars P. Syll’s BlogRandomization — a philosophical device...

I think there are two separate issues here that depend on intent. "P-hacking" likely implies intent, and that is not necessarily a factor in all cases, and it may well not be in many if not most cases. In some cases there may be intent to persuade by playing loose, or even to deceive. I recall that How to Lie with Statistics was required reading in the Stat 101 course I took over fifty years ago. But this is not the only issue. As Richard Feynman famously observed, science is about...

Similar to there Bayesian versus frequentist debate in statistical reasoning.Likelihood Principle My epistemological view on this is that the border between them is fuzzy and needs to be approached on a case by case basis, along with acknowledging a cognitive bias toward greater certainty than is attainable from the given and the reasoning about it. Humans don't like uncertainty and have a strong bias toward minimizing it at the risk of fooling themselves. Even statisticians....