[rando_dfad]

So as I understand Fischer's stance on using stats, you are supposed to start with a hypothesis. As in, you have a mechanism which could cause the effect. The stats are there to provide supporting evidence, to limit BS causal chains.

Data mining is a bit of the reverse of that.

[jewayne]

Exactly. I feel like this is asking the biologists a trick question. The correct answer is, "I don't fucking know. Are you offering me a grant to study this?"

[icegreentea2]

Starting with a hypothesis doesn't require a detailed mechanism. Both questions posed in the article have a proposed mechanism - they clearly have a cause and proposed effect listed. This isn't the same thing as mining a giant generic database looking for arbitrary correlation.

The replication issue highlighted here is how choices in analytical approach can yield differing answers. This would be true even if you had a detailed proposed mechanism.

[jewayne]

But neither one specified a falsifiable hypothesis. Which, to this layman's mind, means that any general statement made based upon the data is itself a hypothesis.