= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Against NHST - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (62)
What kind of answer, other than philosophical deepities, would you expect in response to "...but what does it mean"? Meaning almost entirely depends on the subject and the context.
Is the meaning of a hammer describing its role and use, as opposed to a mere definition describing some physical characteristics, really a 'philosophical deepity'?
When you mumble some jargon about 'the frequency of a class of outcomes in sampling from a particular distribution', you may have defined a p-value, but you have not given a meaning. It is numerology if left there, some gematriya played with distributions. You have not given any reason to care whatsoever about this particular arbitrary construct or explained what a p=0.04 vs a 0.06 means or why any of this is important or what you should do upon seeing one p-value rather than another or explained what other people value about it or how it affects beliefs about anything. (Maybe you should go back and reread the Sequences, particularly the ones about words.)
Just like you don't accept the definition as an adequate substitute for meaning, I don't see why "role and use" would be an adequate substitute either.
As I mentioned, meaning critically depends on the subject and the context. Sometimes the meaning of the p-value boils down to "We can publish that". Or maybe "There doesn't seem to be anything here worth investigating further". But in general case it depends and that is fine. That context dependence is not a special property of the p-value, though.
I'll again refer you to the Sequences. I think Eliezer did an excellent job explaining why definitions are so inadequate and why role and use are the adequate substitutes.
And if these experts, who (unusually) are entirely familiar with the brute definition and don't misinterpret it as something it is not, cannot explain any use of p-values without resorting to shockingly crude and unacceptable contextual explanations like 'we need this numerology to get published', then it's time to consider whether p-values should be used at all for any purpose - much less their current use as the arbiters of scientific truth.
Which is much the point of that quote, and of all the citations I have so exhaustively compiled in this post.
I think we're talking past each other.
Tap.