Re: On inappropriate hypothesis testing. Was: MIT Sexism & statistical bunk

[Radford Neal]

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Thom Baguley  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Why not think of it in terms of "Could this difference be
>produced by 6 players of equal ability influenced by a large number of random
>factors". In that case a significance test might have some value in evaluating
>the hypothesis that one group was better.

Recall that this baseball example was intended to clarify how one
should go about determining whether or not there is reason to think
that MIT discriminated against women faculty.  From your comment, I'd
guess that you think that MIT should not pay faculty based on their
actual achievements, but rather on the basis of some estimate of their
ability, disregarding "random factors".  That's an interesting
opinion, but would a policy of paying based on actual achievement (or
a noisy estimate of actual achievement) constitute discrimination?

   Radford Neal

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Radford M. Neal                                       [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Toronto                     http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford
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