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Paul Meehl is responsible for what is probably the most apt explanation for why some areas of science have made more progress than others over the last 70 years or so. Amazingly, he pointed this out in 1967 and it had seemingly no effect on standard practices:
Because physical theories typically predict numerical values, an improvement in ex-perimental precision reduces the tolerance range and hence increases corroborability. In most psychological research, improved power of a statistical design leads to a prior probability approaching ½ of finding a significant difference in the theoretically predicted direction. Hence the corroboration yielded by "success" is very weak, and becomes weaker with increased precision. "Statistical significance" plays a logical role in psychology precisely the reverse of its role in physics. This problem is worsened by certain unhealthy tendencies prevalent among psychologists, such as a premium placed on experimental "cuteness" and a free reliance upon ad hoc explanations to avoid refuation.
Meehl, Paul E. (1967). "Theory-Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox" (PDF). Philosophy of Science 34 (2): 103–115.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1086%2F288135 . Free here: http://cerco.ups-tlse.fr/pdf0609/Meehl_1967.pdf
There are many science articles posted to this site that fall foul of his critique probably because researchers are not aware of it. In short, this (putatively fatally flawed) research attempts to disprove a null hypothesis rather than a research hypothesis. Videos of some of his lectures are available online:
http://www.psych.umn.edu/meehlvideos.php
Session 7 starting at ~1hr is especially good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @02:21AM
But his later views were modified by the acerbic exchanges he had with Jeffreys in the journals. After those changes, Fisher's arguments started picking up tones reminiscent of Bayes, but he was too proud and bull-headed to have conceded any of Jeffreys points that he ended up co-opting into his own work.
I'd say Fishers statistical philosophy was anti-inverse-probability, in whatever that form happened to take at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 23 2016, @02:59AM
In that paper he disagrees:
Obviously check it yourself to see I'm not doing some selective citing. Of course, that is irrelevant to the issue brought up by Meehl which is much more important. However, if you can back some of your claims about Fisher with citations I would be interested.