Vaniver comments on The Universal Medical Journal Article Error - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 29 April 2014 05:57PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 09 April 2013 03:20:06AM 2 points [-]

Agreed that both have those tools, and rereading my comment I think "approach" may have been a more precise word than "statistics." If you think in terms of "my results are certain, reality is uncertain" then the first tool you reach for is "let's make an interval estimate / put a distribution on reality," whereas if you think in terms of "reality is certain, my results are uncertain" then the first tool you reach for is hypothesis testing. Such defaults have very important effects on what actually gets used in studies.