On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 20:07:56 GMT, Charles D Madewell
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> As a working engineer and part time graduate student I do not even
> understand why anyone would want to do away with hypothesis testing.
> I have spent many, many hours of my graduate school life learning,
> reading, calculating, and analyzing using hypothesis tests.
> Hypothesis testing is not bad. It is errors in designing the
> experiment that are bad and this comes from PEOPLE not the math. What
> is the fuss? Are you guys telling me that all of this knowledge I am
> being taught will be worthless? Come on, find something else to say....
>
The training is fine and useful.
As training in pure logic, you can't lose by it.
Most of the research problems can be expressed in terms of hypotheses;
the people who can't express those problems that way are muddled
thinkers, or are tackling problems that (so far) are too complex for
them.
Some other research problems are questions of estimation:
- How reliable is this rater? You certainly want to be well above
the value of 0. You might want to judge by the point estimator that
is above .80 (say), or you might want to see a Confidence interval
(90%? 75%? 50?) that is entirely above some stated value like .70.
- Or, for huge samples, "significance" is obtained on every
interesting comparison, so the only useful results are the ones where
the effect size is greater than some target-amount.
Technically, there is not much difference between the two (hypothesis
vs estimation). If a research team can't put the question in terms of
hypthesis testing, or tell you WHY it should not be put that way, that
is probably a good enough test of their logic and competence that you
can be safe in dismissing them.
I don't know how well they handle real data, but (a) Dennis has seemed
to fail this STANDARD, on certain hypothetical questions. However, I
don't like those hypothetical questions, because it is too easy to
pretend that they are something else. I think Dennis gets led off by
the hypothetical semantics. (b) Robert Frick has published on
hypthesis testing, and some of his seems quite unrealistic and wrong
to me, too, especially in the description of two competing hypotheses.
It might not be the only way, or eventually it might not be the best
way, but one of the best organizing principles that we have -- right
now -- is that of framing questions as hypotheses.
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
===========================================================================
This list is open to everyone. Occasionally, less thoughtful
people send inappropriate messages. Please DO NOT COMPLAIN TO
THE POSTMASTER about these messages because the postmaster has no
way of controlling them, and excessive complaints will result in
termination of the list.
For information about this list, including information about the
problem of inappropriate messages and information about how to
unsubscribe, please see the web page at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
===========================================================================
