Which in turn reminds me of Box & Tiao's line "Since small differences in probability cannot be appreciated by the human mind, there seems little point in being excessively precise about uncertainty."
Box, G. E. P. & Tiao, G. C. (1973), Bayesian inference in statistical analysis, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, p. 65. Marc Schwartz <marc_schwa...@me.com> Sent by: r-help-boun...@r-project.org 03/15/2010 01:46 PM To ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk cc r-help@r-project.org Subject Re: [R] OT Sorta: Odds Are, It's Wrong... On Mar 15, 2010, at 12:21 PM, Ted Harding wrote: > On 15-Mar-10 16:22:13, Marc Schwartz wrote: >> Hi all, >> I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at >> ScienceNews of interest: >> >> Odds Are, It's Wrong >> Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics >> By Tom Siegfried >> March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26) >> >> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wro >> ng >> >> Regards, >> Marc Schwartz > > If you changed your Subject to "Odds R, it's wrong", arc, you might get > more on-topic, Marc. Or at least increase people's subjective beliefs > that it was OT. Yep, that was just way too obvious, wasn't it...Arrrrr... I plead low serum glucose level this morning, after having some fasting blood work drawn... :-) > That's not a bad article, as such things go! > > I was reminded of reading, many moons ago in a book[1] by John Ziman[2], > words to the effect that[3]: > > "If your experiment gives a result significant at the 5 per cent > level, then 1 in 20 of your colleagues is entitled to disblieve > you." > > [1] > Ziman, John (1968). > Public Knowledge: Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science. > Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-06894-0. > > [2] > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ziman > > [3] > I don't have the book immediately to hand (though I have it somewhere), > so cannot vouch that the above is verbatim. However, it's not far off, > and the final clause very probably is verbatim. In turn, that reminds me of Stephen Senn's writing in Dicing with Death: Chance, Risk and Health: "We can predict nothing with certainty but we can predict how uncertain our predictions will be, on average that is." Regards, Marc ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
