An Open Letter: It's time to convert our science and
educational practice to Bayesian data analysis.
[Link above is html, or click here for pdf.]
• Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
• Adjunct Professor of Statistics
• Core Faculty of the Cognitive Science Program
• Notice, in the photo above, the bumper sticker on the posterior of my car.
• "Friends don't let friends compute p values" (Section header of this article. The copy editors decided to un-contract "don't".)
• "The road to NHST is paved with good intentions" (Section header of this article)
• "Two general reasons that null hypothesis significance testing has less than ambient pressure" (Appendix header of this article. Hint: When a volume of space has less than ambient pressure, we say colloquially that it ...)
"In it an almost preternatural insight into the significance of intelligible forms is fused with a lyrical sensuality that prevents stylization from becoming academic and lifeless, the mere repetition of formulas."
-- Philip Sherrard. Byzantium: The other half of the
world. 1963. [This is not an endorsement of Sherrard's opinions;
I am simply
tickled by the statement, which I memorized when I was
16, because it can be applied to so many things in so many contexts.]
"It seems as though he could only distill it to its strange essentials, as a pointless effort to reach vague goals that aren't clearly worth reaching even once you're there."
-- Art critic Blake Gopnik, regarding the art of Francis Alys. Newsweek, June 13-20, 2011.