Deep problem created by Darwinian Ron Fisher’s p-values highlighted again
| February 18, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, News |
Ronald Fisher/Bletchley
From Frank Harrell at Statistical Thinking:
In my opinion, null hypothesis testing and p-values have done significant harm to science. The purpose of this note is to catalog the many problems caused by p-values. As readers post new problems in their comments, more will be incorporated into the list, so this is a work in progress.
The American Statistical Association has done a great service by issuing its Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values. Now it’s time to act. To create the needed motivation to change, we need to fully describe the depth of the problem.
We thought that Darwin’s reputation in pop science would be enough to frustrate any inquiry, but maybe not.
More.
We’re pretty familiar with all kinds of problems being swept under the rug as long as Darwin’s name can be associated with them in some way. It’s got to be a sign of weakening if the association with Darwin does not matter so much any more.
See also: Early Darwinian Ronald Fisher’s p-value measure is coming under serious scrutiny
and
Darwinism: Replacement or extension?
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36 Responses to Deep problem created by Darwinian Ron Fisher’s p-values highlighted again
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as to this quote from the article:
Two major contributors to frequentist (classical) methods were Fisher and Neyman.[4] Fisher’s interpretation of probability was idiosyncratic (but strongly non-Bayesian). Neyman’s views were rigorously frequentist.,,,
Bayesian refers to methods in probability and statistics named after Thomas Bayes (c. 1702–61). Bayesian probability is an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief.
It is interesting to note why Bayesian probability was developed:
This following site, using Fisher’s “significance testing”, purported to show ‘statistically significant’ support for common ancestry:
Interestingly, this following paper found ‘highly significant’ p-values even for contrasting phylogenetic hypothesis
The following site gives an overview of the many problems inherent for ‘P values’:
As to Theobald’s ‘statistical significance’ paper, Casey Luskin responded thusly,,,
It is sad testimony to the ‘science’ of Darwinian evolution that they have to rely on fraudulently derived ‘statistical significance’ in order to try to provide any supposed proof for their theory.
Verse:
R.A. Fisher was also a Christian, so can we blame Christianity of p-values too?
In reality, the way p-values are (mis-)used today owes more to Neyman & Pearson, who formalised significance testing.
BA77 – Fisher wasn’t a frequentist – his form of probability was much closer to the likelihood school.
Incidentally, a change to Bayesianism or the likelihood school probably wouldn’t change much. Likelihood tests still produce p-values, and Bayesians can do too – there are Bayesian p-values and Bayes Factors that can be mis-used just as badly.
“R.A. Fisher was also a Christian,”
So? Many early supporters of Darwinian evolution were liberal Christians who, IMHO, were Christian in name only.
Still today, Biologos is full of supposed Christians who, apart from their claim of being Christian, you cannot tell apart from full blown neo-Darwinists.
Of corrective note to your post:
Of related note:
BA77 @ 3 –
Indeed. I don’t see that it’s any more relevant than Fisher’s evolutionary work.
Can you be a bit more explicit about your “corrective” than just giving a couple of Wikipedia links, please. It’s not clear to me what exactly you are correcting.
“I” think it is clear enough. And since atheistic materialism can not ground “I” in the first place, then what “I” think carries more weight than what the neuronal illusion labeled Bob thinks. 🙂
Fellow neuronal illusions may disagree! But why should “I”, as a ‘soul’, expect anything else from randomly generated illusions that have no free will?
Bob O’H:
I think we can blame Christianity for Darwinism.
ba77 – if you are right about materialism, then I to have have a soul (regardless of my opinions on the matter). So, although it may be clear to you, it is not clear to this soul. So, I’ll ask again – can you explain what exactly you are trying to correct in my comment?
Mung – ha! I like that! But it might not be a popular view around here. 🙂
“if you are right about materialism, then I to have have a soul (regardless of my opinions on the matter). So, although it may be clear to you, it is not clear to this soul.”
And ‘you’ complain about clarity?
Moreover, given Darwinian premises, it is impossible for anything to ever be ‘clear’ for ‘you’:
That is to say, given materialistic/atheistic premises, not only are our personal beliefs about reality held to be somewhat flawed, and therefore in need of testing, even our perceptions/observations of reality itself are held to be untrustworthy and thus ‘illusory’ given the materialistic premises of atheism.
Richard Dawkins puts the awkward situation between Darwinian evolution and reliable observation like this:
In the following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics, proved that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the math of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
Thus, given materialistic premises, people become neuronal illusions whose observations of reality are illusory.
And why in blue blazes should anyone trust what illusions having illusions have to say about reality?
(of personal note: Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Dream within a Dream” is a fitting reference at this point)
ba77 – would it be possible for you to get back to explaining the “corrective note” @ 3, and clarifying what exactly the correction is. These ad hominems don’t help, and rather give the impression you’re trying to avoid the subject.
Bob O’H, ad hominems?? “You”, if it were possible for there to be a ‘you’ within atheistic materialism, are hallucinating again. I certainly did not attack ‘you’. In fact, I attacked the sheer absurdity of there being no ‘you’ within the atheistic worldview.
Then I pointed out that, according to population genetics, even if there were a ‘you’ within atheistic materialism, then everything ‘you’ perceived would be an illusion.
And even if I did personally attack ‘you’, exactly how is it possible to insult a mindless collection of fermions and bosons since there is no real person within that collection to insult? Do rocks have feelings?
I would ask Bob to be logically consistent in his atheism, but then I would have presuppose a Theistic premise there really is a person named Bob who could be rational. But alas, within atheism there is just a neuronal illusion labeled Bob. All rationality is gone within atheistic materialism!
ba77 – your argument only makes sense if you believe these views you are ascribing to “atheistic materialism”, which I’m certain you don’t. FWIW, I don’t believe them.
So, now we’ve got that out of the way (we both agree that I exist), can we get back to what I had asked – can you please clarify what exactly the correction is @ 3.
Bob O’H, “I don’t believe them”, (i.e. the premises of atheistic materialism.)
So ‘you’ only defend atheistic materialism? When push comes to shove, you don’t actually believe it? Pathetic!
re: Fisher…
“The frequentist or classical school is associated with Sir Ronald Fisher (who gave us the null hypothesis and p-values as evidence against the null) and Neyman and Pearson (who gave us Type I and II errors, power, alternative hypotheses, deciding to reject or not reject based on an alpha level). Fisher and Neyman/Pearson had different views on statistics and what is taught today in the typical “statistics for scientists” course is a jumbled combination of both, which can lead to much confusion (Hubbard & Bayarri, 2003; Christensen, 2005).”
Reference…
Frequentist or Classical School associated with Fisher
From BA77’s wiki link…
“Two major contributors to frequentist (classical) methods were Fisher and Neyman.[4]”
Reference:
(4) Lehmann, E. L. (2011). Fisher, Neyman, and the creation of classical statistics. New York: Springer. ISBN 978-1441994998.
For a class at Waterloo University…
Fisher (e.g. 1922) laid the foundations for a frequentist theory.
ba77 – please don’t bother trying to derail the thread. What, specifically, are the corrections you were pointing to @ 3?
DATCG – Fisher wasn’t a frequentist. He laid the foundations for a maximum likelihood based approach to statistics, which is nowadays interpreted in a frequentist framework, but his philosophy of probability was based on ‘fiducial probablilities’. There’s a joke amongst statisticians that fiducial probability is difficult to explain, because only Fisher really understood them.
Bob O’H, derail the thread? Now that is purposely avoiding a very important point that is now in play. Namely, your admittance @11 that you do not believe atheistic materialism to be true!
You instead want to focus, without any reference thus far, on some mundane point in statistics that is, IMHO, totally empirically trivial as to falsifying Darwinian evolution as far as experimental science itself is concerned, all the while ignoring this major, jaw dropping, self-admitted inconsistency in your actions and beliefs. i.e. You have now admitted that you do not believe atheistic materialism to be true and yet you defend it anyway! Why this stark inconsistency in you actions and beliefs Bob?
More importantly, since you now admit that you believe you really are a real person, instead of a neuronal illusion, how exactly do you ground this ‘personhood’ you believe in? I find it necessary to appeal to Theism so as to ground my ‘personhood’. Namely, I find it necessary to appeal to a ‘soul’ to answer this following simple, yet profound, question: “,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Here is another simple question for you Bob so as to give you the proper perspective on what is truly important and on what is not:
Supplemental quote:
Darwin blamed God…
“I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or the cat should play with mice.”
So, blame God for Darwinism. Christianity gets blamed for everything else.
—————-
P-values have problems. The article linked in the Post discusses problems and list them. And there’s lengthy discussion in comments to follow.
The question is, do these problems with P-Values discussed in the article reflect on possible problems in the past for Darwinism and for Darwin’s Tree of Life today.
I don’t know, but since P-values are utilized, then claims of a Darwinist and Eugenicist like Fisher, or modern day Darwinist is an area for review, is it not? On a broader level, not just P-Values, are statistics merely telling Darwinist what they want to see in the data? Good question if you throw a bias of Darwinist in the equation. Does their need to see outcomes bias the use of statistics?
Are these stats simply used as fodder for a belief system?
Namely, Darwin’s replacement of a Designer he detested with one he liked, that he created – a blind creator of materialist forces.
So, did Fisher misuse Statistics or other Darwinist to prop of their blind creation story?
Worth a deeper look?
What precisely can a P-value tell you? From an article I link below…
“No. 5: “A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect or the importance of a result.””
Quote from Science News…
Experts warn of Misuse of P-Values
Bob, your argument is not with me, but the links and people quoting him as a Frequentist and as laying down the Foundation of Frequentist in University, or books about Fisher and the others. Maybe he was not as rigged as others as is quoted also. If you desire to change Wiki, or the Classroom, or challenge the authors of the books I referenced, etc., do so.
More from the article I linked in #19, on P-Values…
ba77 @17 – I’ll ask once more. What exactly was the corrective you wanted to make at comment 3?
DATCG – I’m well aware of the criticisms of p-values. They are not universally awful, so to say “X uses p-values, therefore X is suspect” is going too far. For the common descent analysis they are probably OK (there are alternative statistics which may be a bit better but it’s a model comparison problem, rather than parameter estimation).
Bob O’H, DATCG listed further references on top of my initial wiki reference, whereas you have listed none thus far. I certainly don’t take ‘your’ word for it. (especially after the fruit fly study shenanigan you pulled a few months ago). To be blunt, I consider you dishonest Bob.
Moreover, ‘you’ have not established that ‘the common descent analysis (is) probably OK’. Not even close.
Darwinists are notorious for fabricating evidence out of thin air, i.e notorious for being liars!.
Yet, when we look at real evidence, instead of statistics that are widely known to be exceptionally prone to personal bias, we find, as Casey Luskin cited, that common descent consistently fails to explain the evidence:
Moreover, if we test the feasibility of ‘unlimited plasticity’, which is a necessary cornerstone of the common descent hypothesis, we find,,,
Thus Bob if you truly want to establish the supposed mathematical validity of your preferred theory, since you have no empirical evidence to do so (in fact empirical evidence falsifies your theory), I suggest that you find the ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe so as to be able to build a proper mathematical model for Darwinian evolution. A rigorous model that can be tested against in the lab!
Else-wise, as you yourself have shown, we are dealing with pseudo-scientists, charlatans and liars, not scientists.
BA, I think Bob is asking you where the disagreement between your quote and his statement lies.
He said that Fisher described signficance testing (true) and that N-P formalized his ideas (true). The N-P idea was called hypothesis testing. You then provided links that say precisely this by claim they are a “correcive”.
Is it possible you have waded into a topic you are ill-equipped to talk about. (Especially with someone who is a senior editor at a journal that deals explicitly with statically inference…).
FWIW, p-values are not used a great deal in phylogenetic analysis. For the most part phylogeneticists maximise a likelihood or examine a posterior distribution of trees. Tests with p-values (or similar approaches with model selection stats or Bayes factors) are sometimes used examine specific hypotheses, but no more than in other fields.
I should add — in the last version of CSI that Dembski defended “CSI” was a p-value under a null hypothesis test. (Or would be, there was no attempt to actually apply the test).
This is surreal. wd400 comes to Bob’s assistance. wd400, in case you are unaware of this fact, you are hardly someone that I, or most people on UD, would consider to be a reliable witness. In fact, I consider your supposed help to be even more damning for Bob’s case.
Moreover, on top of everything, Bob confessed @ 11 “FWIW I don’t believe them”, (i.e. the premises of atheistic materialism.) Thus Bob conceded the main point that I am concerned about. i.e Atheistic materialism is false! Everything else that he says from here on out is icing on the cake as far as I am concerned.
Moreover, you guys can cite jerry-rigged statistics all you want and I will just cite the actual empirical evidence from the fossil record and genetics to refute you. In science, evidence trumps mathematical models all day long!
Bottom line, the old adage applies in regards to Darwinists trying to use jerry-rigged statistics to establish the validity of their atheistic worldview.
It’s not a matter of whether I am a “reliable witness”, you just need to tell Bob what he got wrong in describing Fisher’s and the N-P approach to inference.
I suspect you just misunderstood Bob’s first comment, or at least don’t have a very deep knowledge of the history of statistical inference (few people do, after all!). It would be a simple thing to say you were mistaken. But, as ever, you’d rather do this copy-paste version of the Gish Gallop where you throw out a hundred misconceptions and refuse to defend any of them when they are shown to be wrong.
wd400, too funny, you are the reigning king of refusing to concede when you are wrong.
Bob claimed that “Fisher wasn’t a frequentist”
Yet per DATCG,
Bottom line, Bob made an unreferenced claim that is contrary to several cites. If Bob desires to dispute the counterclaim then the burden is on him to go beyond just him saying so.
DATCG further offered
Thus, I see no need to concede that I am wrong in a technical sense since no evidence has been presented by Bob that I was wrong other than him saying so.
Moreover, even if I were wrong in a technical sense, then, unlike Darwinists such as yourself, I would have no problem whatsoever admitting that I was wrong in a technical sense. Especially since it would not go one micrometer as to providing you actual empirical evidence for your atheistic claims regarding Darwinism. But as the citations on the thread now sit (especially citations by DATCG), I was right in my overall ‘corrective’ towards Bob’s claim that “Fisher wasn’t a frequentist”.
That is just the way it is as it now sits.
As Bob said, Fisher developed Fiducial inference, which is distinct from frequentism (indeed your own links say this…). A brief description (of what is indeed a confusing idea):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiducial_inference
Whatever,
ba77 @ 27 – thank you for finally answering me!
Fisher was certainly not a frequentist – wd400 has given you a link to the Wikipedia page on fiducial inference, which outlines Fisher’s ideas. If you want something more direct to show that Fisher wasn’t a frequentist, here’s a paper where Fisher explicitly attacks the central idea of frequentism (in section 2, “Repeated Sampling from the Same Population”).
Bob O’H, no problem, and thank you for finally conceding, in post 11, after much delay. that you do not believe that you are a mindless automaton with no free will. In other words, thank you for conceding the basic point that you do not believe atheistic materialism to be true.
My question is now, since you self-admittedly do not believe you are a mindless automaton with no free will, why do you continue to defend atheistic materialism as if it were true in your defence of Darwinian precepts? Does not this glaring inconsistency between you actions and beliefs bother you immensely?
Of footnote, per Bayes’ and Price contention that numerous ‘independent witnesses to a miracle’ ‘could overwhelm the great improbability of an event and establish it as fact.’
In regards to that point, I hold that the numerous independent examples of convergent evolution in supposedly widely divergent life forms likewise falsifies common descent.
In fact in just considering the single point of the sheer, mind blowing, complexity being dealt with in life, I hold that you have essentially ‘lost your mind’ if you deny that life was designed:
ba77 – I try to avoid the issues of self and free will, simply because we don’t have a good theory of consciousness. If we did, and it was entirely material, then your argument would be moot. As we don’t, I prefer a simple “I don’t know”.
And no, this isn’t an invitation to try to engage me further. 🙂 As I wrote, I try to avoid discussing these issues, as they usually generate more heat than light (especially here).
Actually Bob, we now do have a good theory of consciousness. That ‘theory’, of course, being the ancient Theistic contention that consciousness is primary and material is derivative.
When push came to shove, you self admittedly rejected the incoherence of the counterclaim, i.e. the claim that material is primary and mind is derivative, since it is epistemologically self-defeating. i.e. You rightly rejected the insane materialistic claim that you are a automaton with no free will!
You back-tracking now and hoping someday for a ‘entirely material’ theory of consciousness will not help you since the same epistemologically self-defeating condition will arise for any conceivable materialistic theory that tries to place material before mind.
Moreover, the obvious fact that consciousness must be primary for experimental science to even be possible is, ‘surprisingly’, born out empirically. In fact, the primacy of consciousness in quantum mechanics is one of the most ‘counter-intuitive’ findings of Quantum Mechanics:
Of supplemental note:
Bob O’H of related note to your self admitted inconsistency between your beliefs and actions, i.e. (you self-admittedly do not believe you are a mindless automaton with no free will, yet you continue to defend atheistic materialism as if it were true)
ba77 – we’re done here. We’re way off the OP, and in addition you’re now you’re puttinq words into my mouth (I’ve never “rejected the incoherence of the counterclaim, i.e. the claim that material is primary and mind is derivative”, merely some of the extrapolations from that claim).
Bob O’H @ 11
Bob O’H @ 32
Bob O’H @ 35
So ‘you’ reject the materialistic ‘extrapolation’ that consciousness is generated by the material brain and you are thus merely an automaton with no free will? Or do you rightly reject the insanity of the position?
If there really is a ‘you’ to clarify your exact position, please clarify the exact insanity of the position that ‘you’ are forced to believe in by no will of your own. 🙂
Dawkins himself admitted that it would be ‘intolerable’ for him to live his life as if atheistic materialism were actually true
In what should be needless to say, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.