The 3 stages of the acceptance of novel truths

 There is an often-heard slogan about the stages of the acceptance of novel truths:

First people deny a thing. 

Then they belittle it. 

Then they say they knew it all along.

I don’t know who was first to state it in one form or another.  Here’s Schopenhauer with a slightly different variant:

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident."        - Arthur Schopenhauer

After recently presenting my paper criticizing the Birnbaum result on the likelihood principle (LP)[1] the reception of my analysis seems somewhere around stage two, in some cases, moving into stage three (see my blogposts of December 6 and 7, 2011).

But it is time to make good on my promise to return to concerns of those (at least in the blogosphere), who were or are still at the first stage of denial (or Schopenhauer's second stage of violent opposition).  Doing so will advance our goal of drilling deeply into some fundamental, puzzling misunderstandings of frequentist error statistical (or sampling) theory.  

Getting Credit (or blame) for Something You Don't Deserve (and first honorable mention)

Ruler at the Bottom of Ocean

It was three months ago that I began this blog with “overheard at the comedy hour at the Bayesian retreat” …and we’re near the end of the repertoire of jokes (unless I hear any new ones).  This last, in effect, accuses the frequentist error-statistical account of licensing the following (make-believe) argument after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010:

  Oil Exec: We had highly reliable evidence that H: the pressure was at normal levels on April 20, 2010!

Senator: But you conceded that whenever your measuring tool showed dangerous or ambiguous readings, you continually lowered the pressure, and that the stringent “cement bond log” test was entirely skipped. 

If you try sometime, you find you get what you need!

picking up the pieces

Thanks to Nancy Cartwright, a little ad hoc discussion group has formed: “PhilErrorStat: LSE: Three weeks in (Nov-Dec) 2011.”  I’ll be posting related items on this blog, in the column to your left, over its short lifetime. We’re taking a look at some articles and issues leading up to a paper I’m putting together to give in Madrid next month on the Birnbaum-likelihood principle business (“Breaking Through the Breakthrough”) at a conference (“The Controversy about Hypothesis Testing,” Madrid, December 15-16, 2011).  I hope also to get this group’s feedback as I follow through on responses I’ve been promising to some of the comments and queries I’ve received these past few months.  

Our very first meeting already reminded me of an issue Christian Robert raised in his blog about Error and Inference: Is the frequentist (error-statistical) interest in probing discrepancies, and the ways in which statistical hypotheses and models can be false, akin to a Bayesian call for setting out rival hypotheses with prior probability assignments?