The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.73 (949 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0472050079 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 352 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-07 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
H. Maier, Glendale Community College, Choice (M. Smith, Journal of Economic Issues (Ron P. H. It is also fun to read, rich with historical information and an excellent reminder of what empirical work of any sort is all about."—Walter Kramer, Stat Papers. Yet statistical tests that ignore quantity remain pervasive, as the authors demonstrate through quantitative analyses of the contents of some very prestigious journals of economics, psychology, and medicine."—Theodore Porter, Science (Theodore Porter Science 2009-06-05)"The book is a model of scholarship, transparent in its metho
McCloskey and Ziliak have been pushing this very elementary, very correct, very important argument through several articles over several years and for reasons I cannot fathom it is still resisted. The quest for statistical significance that pervades science today is a deeply flawed substitute for thoughtful analysis. She is best known for How to Be Human* Though an Economist (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and her most recent book, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006).. Ziliak is the author or editor of many articles and two books. Yet few participants in the scientific bureaucracy have been willing to admit what Ziliak and McCloskey make clear: the emperor has no clothes.”Kenneth Rothman, Professor of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Health The Cult of Statistical Significance shows, field by field, how statistical significance,” a technique that dominates many sciences, has been a huge mistake. Deirdre N. If it takes a book to get it across, I hope this book will do it. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University. Th
"Important work on misuse of statistics by academics" according to David J. Aldous. Tests of statistical significance are a particular tool which is appropriate in particular situations, basically to prevent you from jumping to conclusions based on too little data. Because this topic lends itself to definite rules which can be mechanically implemented, it has been prominently featured in introductory statistics courses and textbooks for 80 years. But according to the principle "if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail", it has become a ritual requirement for academic papers in fields such as economics, psychology and medicine to include tests of significance. As the book argues at length, this . "Exposes the problem, but not much help in solving it" according to D. R. Pitts. The authors do an admirable job of exposing an important issue, but this work only identifies the problem for you, and offers no solution. It seems to go on too long and eventually become s platform for the authors to grip about the injustices that have been served on them in their career. As we have all been indoctrinated into the "cult of significance" through the education system, it would have been nice for the authors to show us how we could do better. Many times we are asked to work statistics on numbers from disciplines on which we have very little knowledge and experience, therefore all we can offer is statistical significance - not m. Mean-spirited and Misguided Peter Kwok I attended a seminar by McCloskey when she announced she was working on this then-upcoming book. So I knew beforehand that its style would be more like a victim-tells-all revenge than a fun-seeking discovery typical of most popular science books. The first half of the book (up to Chapter 13) did turn out to be bitter. However, at least that part was largely based on facts, such as a comprehensive count of academic papers failing to meet certain standards. The second half of the book was devoted to the biographies of key persons who led to the rise of what the authors called the "cult of statistical significance". The book lost any pretense of