I, with my coathors, have submitted a new draft of our paper "The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals". This paper is substantially modified from its previous incarnation. Here is the main argument:"[C]onfidence intervals may not be u...
I'm working on a manuscript on confidence intervals, and I thought I'd share a draft section on the reporting of confidence intervals. The paper has several demonstrations of how CIs may, or may not, offer quality inferences, and how they can differ ma...
I've been doing a lot of reading on confidence interval theory. Some of the reading is more interesting than others. There is one passage from Neyman's (1952) book "Lectures and Conferences on Mathematical Statistics and Probability" (available here) t...
[This post is based largely on my 2013 article for Journal of Mathematical Psychology; see the other articles in that special issue as well for more critiques.]When I tell people that my primary area of research is statistical methods, one of the reactions I often encounter from people untrained in statistics is that “you can prove anything with statistics.” Of course, this rankles, first because it isn't true (unless you…
It is unfortunate that today, we tend to think about statistical theory in terms of Bayesianism vs frequentism. Modern practice is a blend of Fisher's and Neyman's ideas, with the characteristics of the blend driven by convenience rather than principle. Significance tests are lumped in as a “frequentist” technique by Bayesians in an unfortunate rhetorical shorthand.In recent years, the significance test has been critiqued on several grounds, but often these…
