Time:
16:00 – 17:30 (London time);
11 am-12:30 pm (New York, ET)
Check you own time zone.
Deborah G. Mayo (Virginia Tech): Putting the Brakes on the Breakthrough, or “How I used simple logic to uncover a flaw in a controversial 60-year old ‘theorem’ in statistical foundations”
ABSTRACT: An essential component of inference based on familiar frequentist (error statistical) notions p-values, statistical significance and confidence levels, is the relevant sampling distribution (hence the term sampling theory). This results in violations of a principle known as the strong likelihood principle (SLP), or just the likelihood principle (LP), which says, in effect, that outcomes other than those observed are irrelevant for inferences within a statistical model. Now Allan Birnbaum was a frequentist (error statistician), but he found himself in a predicament: He seemed to have shown that the LP follows from uncontroversial frequentist principles! Bayesians, such as Savage, heralded his result as a “breakthrough in statistics”! But there’s a flaw in the “proof”, and that’s what I aim to show in my presentation by means of 3 simple examples:.
Example 1: Trying and Trying Again
Example 2: Two instruments with different precisions
(you shouldn’t get credit/blame for something you didn’t do)
The Breakthrough: Don’t Birnbaumize that data my friend
As in the last 9 years, I will post an imaginary dialogue with Allan Birnbaum at the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Eve, and this will be relevant for the talk.
Deborah G. Mayo is professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Her Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge won the 1998 Lakatos Prize in philosophy of science. She is a research associate at the London School of Economics: Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). She co-edited (with A. Spanos) Error and Inference (2010, CUP). Her most recent book is Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars (2018, CUP). She founded the Fund for Experimental Reasoning, Reliability and the Objectivity and Rationality of Science (E.R.R.O.R Fund) which sponsored a 2 week summer seminar in Philosophy of Statistics in 2019 for 15 faculty in philosophy, psychology, statistics, law and computer science (co-directed with A. Spanos). She publishes widely in philosophy of science, statistics, and philosophy of experiment. She blogs at errorstatistics.com and phil-stat-wars.com.