Has the “abandon significance” movement in statistics trickled down into philosophy of science? A little bit. Nowadays (since the late 1990’s [i]), probabilistic inference and confirmation enter in philosophy by way of fields dubbed formal epistemology and Bayesian epistemology. These fields, as I see them, are essentially ways to do analytic epistemology using probability. Given ..read more

. John Park, MD Medical Director of Radiation Oncology North Kansas City Hospital Clinical Assistant Professor Univ. Of Missouri-Kansas City [An earlier post  by J. Park on this topic: Jan 17, 2022: John Park: Poisoned Priors: Will You Drink from This Well? (Guest Post)] Abandoning P-values and Embracing Artificial Intelligence in Medicine The move to abandon P-values that started 5 years ago was, as we say in medicine, merely a symptom of a deeper more sinister diagnosis. Within medicine, the diagnosis was a lack of statistical and philosophical knowledge. Specifically, this prese ..read more

. Ron S. Kenett Chairman of the KPA Group; Senior Research Fellow, the Samuel Neaman Institute, Technion, Haifa; Chairman, Data Science Society, Israel   What’s happening in statistical practice since the “abandon statistical significance” call This is a retrospective view from experience gained by applying statistics to a wide range of problems, with an emphasis on the past few years. The post is kept at a general level in order to provide a bird’s eye view of the points being made. An important impact on the current practice of statistics is the merging of empirical predictive a ..read more

. Professor Daniël Lakens Human Technology Interaction Eindhoven University of Technology [Some earlier posts by D. Lakens on this topic are at the end of this post]* This continues Part 1: 4: Most do not offer any alternative at all At this point, it might be worthwhile to point out that most of the contributions to the special issue do not discuss alternative approaches to p < .05 at all. They discuss general problems with low quality research (Kmetz, 2019), the importance of improving quality control (D. W. Hubbard & Carriquiry, 2019), results blind reviewing (Locascio, 2019), or t ..read more

. Professor Daniël Lakens Human Technology Interaction Eindhoven University of Technology *[Some earlier posts by D. Lakens on this topic are listed at the end of part 2, forthcoming this week] How were we supposed to move beyond  p < .05, and why didn’t we? It has been 5 years since the special issue “Moving to a world beyond p < .05” came out (Wasserstein et al., 2019). I might be the only person in the world who has read all 43 contributions to this special issue. [In part 1] I will provide a summary of what the articles proposed we should do instead of p < .05, and [in part ..read more

. Professor Andrea Saltelli UPF Barcelona School of Management, Barcelona, Spain, Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway [An earlier post by A. Saltelli on this topic: Nov 22, 2019: A. Saltelli (Guest post): What can we learn from the debate on statistical significance?] Analytic flexibility: a badly kept secret? In a previous post in this blog I expressed concern about a loss of trust that could incur the activity of scientific quantification – as practiced in several discipline – unless some technical and normative element of crisis co ..read more

I’m reblogging reader commentaries on my editorial, “The statistics wars and intellectual conflicts of interest“. 3 are published in Conservation Biology; a 4th, by Lakens, is in the Journal of the International Society of Physiotherapy.  This post was first published on May 15, 2022. Thus, “soon to be” refers to the past. Share your remarks in the comments. ************************** There are 3 commentaries soon to be published in Conservation Biology o also published in Conservation Biology. . Professor Philip B. Stark Department of Statistics University of California, Berkeley ..read more

. Before posting new reflections on where we are 5 years after the ASA P-value controversy–both my own and readers’–I will reblog some reader commentaries from 2022 in connection with my (2022) editorial in Conservation Biology: “The Statistical Wars and Intellectual Conflicts of Interest”. First, here are excerpts from my editorial: The Statistics Wars and Intellectual Conflicts of Interest How should journal editors react to heated disagreements about statistical significance tests in applied fields, such as conservation science, where statistical inferences often are the basis for controv ..read more

  les stats, c’est moi This is the last of the selected posts I will reblog from 5 years ago on the 2019 statistical significance controversy. The original post, published on this blog on December 13, 2019, had 85 comments, so you might find them of interest.  I invite readers to share their thoughts as to where the field is now, in relation to that episode, and to alternatives being used as replacements for statistical significance tests. Use the comments and send me guest posts.  When it comes to the statistics wars, leaders of rival tribes sometimes sound as if they believe ..read more

. I continue my selective 5-year review of some of the posts revolving around the statistical significance test controversy from 2019. This post was first published on the blog on November 14, 2019. I feared then that many of the howlers of statistical significance tests would be further etched in granite after the ASA’s P-value project, and in many quarters this is, unfortunately, true. One that I’ve noticed quite a lot is the (false) supposition that negative results are uninformative. Some fields, notably psychology, keep to a version of simple Fisherian tests, ignoring Neyman-Pearson (N ..read more