It Is Time to Stop Teaching Frequentism to Non-Statisticians (2024)
26 comments
·May 24, 2025robwwilliams
Yes old, but even worse, it is not a well argued review. Yes, Bayesian statistics are slowly gaining an upper hand at higher levels of statistics, but you know what should be taught to first year undergrads in science? Exploratory data analysis! One of the first books I voluntarily read in stats was Mosteller and Tukey’s gem: Data Analysis and Regression. A gem. Another great book is Judea Pearl’s Book of Why.
wiz21c
Definitely. It always amazes me that in many situations, I'm applying some stats algorithm just to conclude: let's look at these data some more...
bmacho
Article is from 2012, compare [0] and [1].
The pdf got replaced for some reason (bug, or sensitive information in the meta or idk), but the article seems to have stayed the same, except the date.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2590v1.pdf
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/0if_/https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201....
NewsaHackO
It’s weird how random people can submit non peer reviewed articles to preprint repos. Why not just use a blog site, medium or substack?
jxjnskkzxxhx
> Why not just use a blog site, medium or substack?
Because it looks more credible, obviously. In a sense it's cargo cult science: people observe this is the style of science, and so copy just the style; to a casual observer it appears to be science.
groceryheist
Two reasons:
1. Preprint servers create DOIs, making works better citable.
2. Preprint servers are archives, ensuring works remain accessible.
My blog website won't outlive me for long. What happened to geocities could also happen to medium.
SoftTalker
Who would want to cite a random unreviewed preprint?
mitthrowaway2
You don't get a free pass to not cite relevant prior literature just because it's in the form of an unreviewed preprint.
If you're writing a paper about a longstanding math problem and the solution gets published on 4chan, you still need to cite it.
bowsamic
It happens way more than you expect. In my PhD I used to cite unreviewed preprints that were essential to my work but simply for whatever reason hadn’t been pushed to publication. More common for long review like papers
amelius
Maybe other pseudoscientists who agree with the ideas presented and want to create a parallel universe with alternative facts?
billfruit
Why the gatekeeping. Only what is said matters, not who says it.
tsimionescu
That's a cute fantasy, but it doesn't work beyond a tiny scale. Credentials are critical to help filter data - 8 billion people all publishing random info can't be listened to.
SoftTalker
> 8 billion people all publishing random info can't be listened to.
Yet it's what we train LLMs on.
BlarfMcFlarf
Peer review specifically checks that what is being said passes scrutiny by experts in the field, so it is very much about what is being said.
SJC_Hacker
They why isn't it double blind ?
birn559
If what is said has any merit can be very hard to judge beyond things that are well known.
In addition, peer reviews are anonymous for both sides (as far as possible).
ujkiolp
i would filter your dumb shit
watwut
Yeah, that is why 4chan became famous for being the source of trustworthy and valuable scientific research. /s
brudgers
Previous submission comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32341770
Frequentists stats aren't wrong. It's just a special case that has been elevated to unreasonable standards. When the physical phenomenon in question is truly random, frequentist methods can be a convenient mathematical shortcut.
But bayesian methods get you to exactly the same result in a more flexible, general way. Frequentist methods were explicitly designed to remove footguns and provide a blessed path that is computationally tractable. Effectively, it makes it easier without fully understanding the math, for better or worse.
Should you learn the frequentist shortcuts? Or the math foundations that let you derive those approaches? I do think the frequentist approach is showing its cracks; the low hanging fruit has been picked and most interesting questions require more innovative math. And training a few generations of scientists to avoid math and just plug their numbers into stats software... probably not the best idea.