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I'm speaking from what I saw in the LIGO and CERN (Higg's Boson) papers. They spend way too much time on rejecting some questionable model of the background rat
by nonbel 8y ago
I'm speaking from what I saw in the LIGO and CERN (Higg's Boson) papers. They spend way too much time on rejecting some questionable model of the background rather than testing actual predictions.
From media interviews, I'll also say on the theorist side of it they seem to harbor all the usual misconceptions about p-values as seen in psych and medicine. But they do eventually fit an actual prediction to the data, like a model of black holes colliding, or whatever. However, I don't personally know how many degrees of freedom they have in these fits...
- keldaris 8y agoLIGO and the Higgs boson example are both extreme outliers in physics in terms of scale, how much statistics they necessarily involve, the scrutiny and publicity they get and almost every other property. I'd also note that scientists trying to oversimplify things for a media interview almost always screw up somewhere. I wouldn't draw any conclusions about physics in general from either their papers or (especially) interviews.