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by acover 3350 days ago
Yes, I agree that p-value tests have flaws. If you look at the data to determine your hypothesis it's easy to overfit.

Bayes factor appear to solve this issue. I disagree that this is a basic education issue. It is a lack of agreement among scientists as to what statistical analysis is appropriate.

1 comments

"So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era"

There are at least a couple of statistical fallacies in this conclusion. And there isn't a lack of agreement about that.

One problem with p-value tests is precisely that people misunderstand what the p-value means, which is where basic education comes in. It could save people from believing a lot of things they shouldn't. (Like many health and fitness crazes over the last generation, for instance) Or at the very least, we could train science journalists.

Do you agree to the statement "so it's 99.5% that we correctly reject the hypothesis it occurred without warming over the industrial era"?
I think you're mainly correct. The main issue is that there's an implied "given that the model from http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v10/n2/full/ngeo2863.html is 'perfect' (at least for this case)". Since it seems unlikely that the model is perfect, the numbers they give are almost certainly inflated.
Nope. I'm totally wrong.