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Re:Ways to fix statistics by analog31 on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:29PM (#15829121)
What I wonder is, given a system with perverse incentives, won't people find a way to abuse Bayesian statistics?
Re:Ways to fix statistics by lliiffee on Friday December 01, 2017 @08:02PM (#15829353)
I'm sure they would! But there's a pretty strong argument it's a step in the right direction. Actually, this link makes a more modest proposal that papers should report likelihoods rather than p-values. This avoids reported results results depending on priors (which perhaps we don't trust authors to choose well), though a reader can easily impose themselves if they want to.

https://arbital.com/p/likelihoods_not_pvalues/

You still have the option to muck with things by choosing your hypothesis class in a bad way-- nothing can really replace publishing data!

Re:Ways to fix statistics by timClicks on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:38PM (#15829186)
Probably.. but with Bayesian methods at your model/data updates its priors, rather than you effectively embedding your prior beliefs into your models via selectively choosing tests that support them.
Re:Ways to fix statistics by dnautics on Saturday December 02, 2017 @04:19AM (#15831111)
It's very easy to let that slip into post hoc justification of your priors.
Re:Ways to fix statistics by analog31 on Saturday December 02, 2017 @11:29AM (#15832594)
In my view, "prior" may be a misnomer. There is nothing that I'm aware of in Bayes' theorem to suggest that you have to formulate your priors before gathering or analyzing your data. I would describe priors as constraints that are included in an analysis, to narrow the results based on additional information that you're aware of. Bayes' theorem mainly provides a framework for computing what happens when you do that.
Re:Ways to fix statistics by kgwgk on Saturday December 02, 2017 @12:32PM (#15832945)
Maybe the prior doesn’t need to be formulated _before_ getting the data, but it needs to be _independent_ of the data.