. On June 1, 2019, I posted portions of an article [i],“There is Still a Place for Significance Testing in Clinical Trials,” in Clinical Trials responding to the 2019 call to abandon significance. I reblog it here. While very short, it effectively responds to the 2019 movement (by some) to abandon the concept of statistical significance [ii]. I have recently been involved in researching drug trials for a condition of a family member, and I can say that I’m extremely grateful that they are still reporting error statistical assessments of new treatments, and using carefully designed statistica ..read more

. It was 3 months before I decided to write a blogpost in response to Wasserstein, Schirm and Lazar (2019)’s editorial in The American Statistician in which they recommend that the concept of “statistical significance” be abandoned, hereafter, WSL 2019. (I titled it “Don’t Say What You don’t Mean”.) In that June 17, 2019 blogpost, pasted below, I proposed 3 “friendly amendments” to the language of that document. The problem is that WSL 2019 presents several of the 6 principles from ASA I (the 2016 ASA statement on Statistical Significance) in a far stronger fashion so as to be inconsistent o ..read more

  .. Five years ago on this day, a news correspondent at NPR, Richard Harris, published this article, the same day as Wasserstein et al., (2019). Moving to a world beyond “p < 0.05”. TAS, and Amrhein et al., (2019), Comment: Retire statistical significance. Nature. I was one of several people Harris interviewed for his article. He starts by talking of flip-flops regarding the healthfulness of eggs. Statisticians say it may not be wise to put all your eggs in the significance basket. A recent study that questioned the healthfulness of eggs raised a perpetual question: Why do studie ..read more

.. In my last post, I sketched some first remarks I would have made had I been able to travel to London to fulfill my invitation to speak at a Royal Statistical Society conference, March 4 and 5, 2024, on “the promises and pitfalls of preregistration.” This is a continuation. It’s a welcome consequence of today’s statistical crisis of replication that some social sciences are taking a page from medical trials and calling for preregistration of sampling protocols and full reporting. In 2018, Brian Nosek and others wrote of the “Preregistration Revolution”, as part of open science initiatives ..read more

. I had been invited to speak at a Royal Statistical Society meeting, held March 4 and 5, 2024, on “the promises and pitfalls of preregistration”—a topic in which I’m keenly interested. The meeting was organized by Dr Tom Hardwicke, Professor Marcus Munafò, Dr Sophia Crüwell, Professor Dorothy Bishop FRS FMedSci, and Professor Eric-Jan Wagenmakers. Unfortunately, I was unable to travel to London, so I had to decline attending a few months ago. But, I thought I might jot down some remarks here. The flyer defines preregistration as “publicly declaring study plans before collecting or analyzing ..read more

17 Feb 1890-29 July 1962 Today is R.A. Fisher’s birthday! I am reblogging what I call the “Triad”–an exchange between  Fisher, Neyman and Pearson (N-P) published 20 years after the Fisher-Neyman break-up. While my favorite is still the reply by E.S. Pearson, which alone should have shattered Fisher’s allegations that N-P “reinterpret” tests of significance as “some kind of acceptance procedure”, all three are chock full of gems for different reasons. They are short and worth rereading. Neyman’s article pulls back the cover on what is really behind Fisher’s over-the-top polemics, what wi ..read more

I will be giving an online talk on Friday, Feb 2, 4:30-5:45 NYC time, at a conference you can watch on zoom this week (Jan 30-Feb 2): Is Philosophy Useful for Science, and/or Vice Versa?  It’s taking place in-person and online at Chapman University. My talk is: “The importance of philosophy of science for Statistical Science and vice versa”. I’ll touch on a current paper I’m writing that (finally) gets back to “Bayesian conceptions of severity”, (in contrast to error statistical severity) as begun on the post on Van Dongen, Springer, and Wagenmaker (2022). I’ll put my slides up here on Fr ..read more

$8,765.53 X 2 I want to extend my warmest thanks to all who became Friends of David R. Cox in 2022. Your generous donations to the David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award are honoring the contributions of David R. Cox, and promoting the importance of statistical foundations in the American Statistical Association (ASA): Karim Abadir, Heather Battey, Yoav Benjamini, Stuart Bevan, Alex Blocker, John Bibby, Lynne Billard, Sheila M. Bird, William Browning, John Byrd, Nancy Cartwright, Michael P. Cohen, Noel Cressie, Robert Crouchley, Gary R. Cutter, Anthony C. Davison, Bianca De Stavola, Ed ..read more

. If you read my 2023 paper on Cox’s philosophy of statistics, you’ll have come across Cox’s famous “weighing machine” example, which is thought to have caused “a subtle earthquake” in foundations of statistics. If you’re curious as to why that is, you’ll be interested to know that each year, on New Year’s Eve, I return to the conundrum. This post gives some background, and collects the essential links. An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist notions: p-values, significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution (hence the term sampling theory ..read more

On November 14, I gave a talk at the Seminar in Advanced Research Methods for the Department of Psychology, Princeton University. “Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: Beyond Probabilism and Performance” The video of my talk is below along with the slides. It reminds me to return to a paper, half-written, replying to a paper on “A Bayesian Perspective on Severity” (van Dongen, Sprenger, Wagenmakers (2022). These authors claim that Bayesians can satisfy severity “regardless of whether the test has been conducted in a severe or less severe fashion”, but what they mean is that data can b ..read more