Mounting failures of replication in social and biological sciences give a new urgency to critically appraising proposed reforms. This book pulls back the cover on disagreements between experts charged with restoring integrity to science. It denies two pervasive views of the role of probability in inference: to assign degrees of belief, and to control error rates in a long run. If statistical consumers are unaware of assumptions behind rival evidence reforms, they can't scrutinize the consequences that affect them (in personalized medicine, psychology, etc.). The book sets sail with a simple tool: if little has been done to rule out flaws in inferring a claim, then it has not passed a severe test. Many methods advocated by data experts do not stand up to severe scrutiny and are in tension with successful strategies for blocking or accounting for cherry picking and selective reporting. Through a series of excursions and exhibits, the philosophy and history of inductive inference come alive. Philosophical tools are put to work to solve problems about science and pseudoscience, induction and falsification.
Preface
Excursion 1. How to Tell What's True about Statistical Inference: Tour I. Beyond probabilism and performance
Tour II. Error probing tools vs. logics of evidence
Excursion 2. Taboos of Induction and Falsification: Tour I. Induction and confirmation
Tour II. Falsification, pseudoscience, induction
Excursion 3. Statistical Tests and Scientific Inference: Tour I. Ingenious and severe tests
Tour II. It's the methods, stupid
Tour III. Capability and severity: deeper concepts
Excursion 4. Objectivity and Auditing: Tour I. The myth of 'the myth of objectivity'
Tour II. Rejection fallacies: whose exaggerating what?
Tour III. Auditing: biasing selection effects and randomization
Tour IV. More auditing: objectivity and model checking
Excursion 5. Power and Severity: Tour I. Power: pre-data and post-data
Tour II. How not to corrupt power
Tour III. Deconstructing the N-P vs. Fisher debates
Excursion 6. (Probabilist) Foundations Lost, (Probative) Foundations Found: Tour I. What ever happened to Bayesian foundations?
Tour II. Pragmatic and error statistical Bayesians
Souvenir (Z) farewell
References
Index.