[lisper]

Now you're moving the goal posts. First, it was "a hypothesis is a statement that can be true or false. That's it." Now it's "a hypothesis is defined by statistics". Get back to me when you've decided what your position actually is. I'm not going to waste time debunking every half-baked idea you can come up with.

[ninetyninenine]

The goal posts were never moved. What moved is your understanding of what I'm trying to say.

A hypothesis is a statement that is TRUE or FALSE. And THIS is HOW it's defined by statistics.

>I'm not going to waste time debunking every half-baked idea you can come up with.

I'm sorry but this attitude is offensive and against the rules here. I can't participate in any further discussion with you because of this. Thank you for your time and good day.

[Koshkin]

I don't think that physics (for example) uses the word "hypothesis" in the same sense, even though there are, indeed, parallels between the two sciences.

[ninetyninenine]

What is the physics definition and what sciences are you referring to?

[Koshkin]

A statistical hypothesis is an assumption about a population parameter. A hypothesis in physics is something else entirely. (Incidentally, there are hypotheses in mathematics, too, called "conjectures"). You may disagree, but I see statistics as a science, akin to physics; which, perhaps, is why we also have "mathematical statistics."

[ninetyninenine]

Well both are statements that can be true or false.

I would say in physics it's also a population parameter. It's just sometimes we feel so confident about a single observation that we only need to take 1 sample.

>You may disagree, but I see statistics as a science, akin to physics

I don't disagree. This has been my entire point. I define statistics as the foundational formal definition of the scientific method.

[lisper]

> The goal posts were never moved.

Yes, they were. You started out by saying, "a hypothesis is a statement that can be true or false. That's it." But that isn't "it" as you yourself found it necessary to explain.

> I can't participate in any further discussion

That's fine, I'm writing this response for the benefit of others who might be reading this: not only are both of your claims wrong, they are transparently wrong. "Santa Claus lives at the North Pole" is a statement that can be either true or false (it happens to be false) but it doesn't have the same standing as a scientific hypothesis as, say, "the laws of physics are invariant under Galilean relativity." That happens to be false too, but it is not nearly as false as "Santa Claus lives at the North Pole." And neither of these has anything to do with statistics.

You clearly don't understand the first thing about how the scientific method actually works, starting with the fact that you cannot strip away "the cultural stuff." Science is a human endeavor. It is ultimately about accounting for our subjective experiences because that is all any of us have direct access to. This includes, but is not limited to, the fact that there seems to be this thing people do called "science", which has a bunch of interesting properties and turns out to be tremendously useful. Statistics are only a small part of that endeavor. An important part to be sure, but a small part nonetheless.

[ninetyninenine]

Dear comment reader, there's no benefit for reading this section of the thread. Not only is he wrong. He's been rude and insulting and in violation of the rules. I flagged his section of the thread. I'm not the moderator but I think this thread will be killed by him once he sees it.

Meanwhile, before the moderator arrives, I'm placing this comment here to ask people to stop responding to him and aggravating the thread further. Thank you.

[FabHK]

Or maybe you're misguided? You seem to want to expound a fairly naive Popperian view of science, but cannot distinguish "proposition" from "hypothesis".

[ninetyninenine]

So? That’s my opinion. The insults were uncalled for.

Please don’t aggrevate this further.

[montjoy]

Hi. Comment reader here. Regardless whether you are right or not you’re coming across as obstinate. It might do you well to eat some humble pie.

[ninetyninenine]

If that’s the case, then I apologize, it wasn’t my intention. Still, being confident about my answers is entirely different from insults which are always uncalled for.

Either way please stop extending this thread.

[_proofs]

no one has really insulted you, so the playing the victim part is also coming across as more obstinate -- what you are experiencing is people becoming frustrated with the assertions.

you have been sufficiently approached, your points addressed, and multiple people have provided ample reasoning that expound on their assertions, adding context, nuance, historical, conventional, or otherwise.

all you have contributed to the over-reaching discussion is assertions (in some cases they come across as not fully thought out, as if the tape was not fully played), followed be an emphatic and repeated: "you're wrong!"

and for as much as you have claimed to strip away culture as an influence to the discussion, you have also managed to strip away important nuances between established words in our -- cultural -- expression here: proposition vs. hypothesis.

it appears that the position here is attempting to generally (and loosely) apply a statistical hypothesis as the internal world model for science at large, where in stats the word hypothesis is almost a binary operator evaluating to true or false (ie: Null Hypothesis), and functionally operates more like asserting a proposition over a data set, and then evaluating the data to see if it holds.

as a comment reader, while i appreciate the discussion, reducing everything to a statistical hypothesis and then telling people they are wrong when they show, not tell, there are important, established, agreed upon meanings, is not contributing in good faith, which i imagine is causing a lot of the aforementioned frustrations.