Cyan comments on Case study: abuse of frequentist statistics - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Cyan 21 February 2010 06:35AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 25 February 2010 10:25:58PM 1 point [-]

Perhaps it's frequentist evidence against frequentist statistics.

Comment author: Cyan 26 February 2010 12:30:07AM 1 point [-]

I think this is just a glib rejoinder, but if there's a deeper thought there, I'd be interested to hear it.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 27 February 2010 04:04:02AM *  2 points [-]

The critique of frequentist statistics, as I understand it - and I don't think I do - is that frequentists like to count things, and trust that having large sample sizes will take care of biases for them. Therefore, a case in which frequentist statistics co-occurs with bad results counts against use of frequentist statistics, and you don't have to worry about why the results were bad.

The whole Bayesian vs. frequentist argument seems a little silly to me. It's like arguing that screws are better than nails. It's true that, for any particular individual joint you wish to connect, a screw will probably connect it more securely and reversibly than a nail. That doesn't mean there's no use for nails.