Beyond Hypothesis Testing

Abstract

The extraordinary success of physicists to find simple laws that explain many phenomena is beguiling. With the exception of quantum mechanics, it suggests a deterministic world in which theories are right or wrong, and the world is simple. However, attempts to apply such thinking to other phenomena have not been so successful. Individually and collectively we face many situations dominated by uncertainty, about weather and climate, about how wisely to raise children, and how the economy should be managed. The controversy about hypothesis testing is dominated by the tension between simple explanations and the complexity of the world we live in.

Keywords

• significance tests
• confidence intervals
• Bayesian analysis
• hypothesis tests
• prior distributions
• posterior distributions