Oscar_Cunningham comments on Open thread, 24-30 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (156)
Your conclusion
is correct. Frequentists do indeed claim that P(hypothesis | data) is meaningless for exactly the reasons you gave. However there are some little details in the rest of your post that are incorrect.
The hypothesis you are trying to test is typically not the complement of the null hypothesis. For example we could have:
where theta is some variable that we care about. Note that the region theta<0 isn't in either hypothesis. If we were instead testing
then frequentists would suggest a different test. They would use a one-tailed test to test H1 and a two-tailed test to test H1'. See here.
No. This is just mathematically wrong. P(A|B) is not necessarily equal to 1-P(A|¬B). Just think about it for a bit and you'll see why. If that doesn't work, take A="sky is blue" and B="my car is red" and note that P(A|B)=P(A|¬B)~1.