[ExI] Again: psi or bad statistics?

Eliezer Yudkowsky sentience at pobox.com
Mon Jul 14 05:11:43 UTC 2008


I don't trust this document
   http://www.as.utexas.edu/jefferys/slides/berger.pdf
because its author says some silly things about Bayesian philosophy,
notably, the idea that "objective Bayes" provides "objective"
posterior probabilities in experiments.

However, it says that a Dean Radin psi experiment which was
"statistically significant" at p ~ .0003, subjected to a Bayesian
re-analysis, ends up with the null hypothesis going to a posterior
probability of 0.92 if it started with prior probability 0.5.

I was wondering if Radin had a standard response to this.  It seems
like a generally useful example of Why To Never Use P-Values, *if*
true.

Damien?

-- 
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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