4 ms·

The null hypothesis signifies a lack of relatedness. Give circumstance A and outcome B, we make no assumptions, i.e. we assume A and B are unrelated by not assu

by fnovd 9y ago

The null hypothesis signifies a lack of relatedness. Give circumstance A and outcome B, we make no assumptions, i.e. we assume A and B are unrelated by not assuming they are related. This is the null hypothesis. In order to reject that, we must provide compelling evidence. If you start by assuming A and B are related, your experiment would have to fail reject that notion in order to prove that A and B are indeed related, which is a less direct way of approaching scientific discovery.

nonbel 9y ago
You are also confused about the meaning of "null": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703503
- bkberry352 9y ago
  No, they're not. The commonly accepted definition of Null Hypothesis is "the hypothesis of no effect or no relationship" (source: statistics master's degree, but it's also the first sentence in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis)
  - nonbel 9y ago
    That is an awful wikipedia page. How can that even make sense? As soon as people start predicting things it is impossible to test the prediction? Also, the intro of that page contains blatantly incorrect statements: >"In the significance testing approach of Ronald Fisher, a null hypothesis is rejected if the observed data are significantly unlikely to have occurred if the null hypothesis were true. In this case the null hypothesis is rejected and an alternative hypothesis is accepted in its place." There is no alternative hypothesis in Fisher's significance testing. Here is a better wikipedia page: "We may, however, choose any null hypothesis we please, provided it is exact."-Ronald Fisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments I've heard that a lot of math fields really fail to teach history, perhaps that is what happened in your stats program.

by fnovd 9y ago

nonbel 9y ago

You are also confused about the meaning of "null": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703503

bkberry352 9y ago
No, they're not. The commonly accepted definition of Null Hypothesis is "the hypothesis of no effect or no relationship" (source: statistics master's degree, but it's also the first sentence in the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis)
- nonbel 9y ago
  That is an awful wikipedia page. How can that even make sense? As soon as people start predicting things it is impossible to test the prediction? Also, the intro of that page contains blatantly incorrect statements: >"In the significance testing approach of Ronald Fisher, a null hypothesis is rejected if the observed data are significantly unlikely to have occurred if the null hypothesis were true. In this case the null hypothesis is rejected and an alternative hypothesis is accepted in its place." There is no alternative hypothesis in Fisher's significance testing. Here is a better wikipedia page: "We may, however, choose any null hypothesis we please, provided it is exact."-Ronald Fisher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Experiments I've heard that a lot of math fields really fail to teach history, perhaps that is what happened in your stats program.