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Is it really less intuitive? I would've said less familiar. Null-hypothesis significance testing is unintuitive: nonexperts seem to explain it wrongly more ofte
by abecedarius 10y ago
Is it really less intuitive? I would've said less familiar. Null-hypothesis significance testing is unintuitive: nonexperts seem to explain it wrongly more often than not. (Like "the p-value is the probability the result was random chance".) Probably both approaches are unintuitive to humans unless they're explained really well.
- paulddraper 10y agoYou're right. True understanding of null hypothesis and p-value isn't easier than Bayesian. Heck, just try to figure out if you need a one-sided or two-sided test. But it's easier to try to black box it and say this number cruncher tells me if these two things are really different. Of course, if you don't understand what's going on, you start p-hacking. Anyway, you're I think you're right.
- abecedarius 10y agoI'd guess the majority of p-hacking is not intentionally fraudulent, yeah. The first few intros to stats I tried to read had trouble sinking in -- it felt opaque and authoritarian somehow. Easy to treat it as a cookbook until I learned of the bayesian approach.
- ted_dunning 10y agoActually, telling you whether things are different isn't the goal. The goal is to make practical business decisions with reasonably high likelihood of being right and, if wrong, having only limited impact. The output of a well done Bayesian analysis can be very easy for business people to understand. Statements like (you have a 60% chance of making just the right decision and a 35% chance of making a decision that is within 3% of right) are easy for most business stake-holders to understand because that is close to how they frame their own decision making process. Laboring to reject a null hypothesis is an unnatural act for most people.