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by ced 4224 days ago
it advocates bayesian statistics, which is a reasonable decision, but seems to take it to such an extreme that "hypothesis test" never appears in the table of contents...

That's not very unusual. It seems to follow the "logic of science" approach from Jaynes. Hypothesis testing is covered in chapters 4 and 6. Other books (Mackay, Jaynes, Murphy) only cover frequentist hypothesis testing to argue against it, so this is rather refreshing.

2 comments

It's very unusual to not cover hypothesis testing in an introduction to statistics class. The students are going to see "testing" again. The passage you quoted was about teaching from the book, not using it for self study.
Whether the textbook author wants to preach the Way of Bayes or not, the students, provided they actually become empirical scientists, are going to face journal and conference reviewers who want to see p-values. Failing to teach them how to construct credible intervals and perform Bayesian significance testing based on posterior distributions is failing to teach them skills necessary for our profession.