Dear Cambridge Philosophers of Science, Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the second meeting for CamPoS, which returns to its usual time of 1 p.m. in the HPS department in seminar room 2 in the basement. HPS's own Jacob Stegenga (co-author Zoë Hitzig of Harvard) will present 'The Perils of P-Hacking and the Promise of Pre-Analysis Plans'. Their abstract is below.
Sincerely, J. Brian Pitts Abstract: P-hacking involves the manipulation of data to find a statistically significant result. Many claim that p-hacking is a problem in science, especially in the medical and social sciences, while others deny this. The problem with p-hacking is usually articulated from a frequentist perspective. In this paper we articulate the epistemic peril of p-hacking using Bayesian confirmation theory and model selection theory, which we then draw on to explain the arguments on both sides of the debate. This requires a novel understanding of Bayesianism, since a standard criticism of Bayesian confirmation theory is that it cannot accommodate the influence of biased methods. A methodological device widely used to mitigate the peril of p-hacking is a pre-analysis plan. Some say that following a pre-analysis plan is epistemically meritorious while others deny this, and in practice pre-analysis plans are often violated. We use the formal groundwork developed earlier in the paper to resolve this debate, offering a modest defence of the use of pre-analysis plans. In the longer run our ambition is to use this approach to make sense of scenarios in which scientists depart from pre-analysis plans. -- J. Brian Pitts Senior Research Associate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge jb...@cam.ac.uk Ph.D., Philosophy/History & Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame Ph.D., Physics, University of Texas at Austin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
