I don’t think the net effect of a mass switch to Bayesian methods would be negative, but I do think it’d be very small unless it involved raising the general statistical competence of scientists.
I think that teaching Bayesian methods would itself raise the general statistical competence of scientists as a side effect, among other things because the meaning of p-values is seriously counter-intuitive (so more scientists would actually grok Bayesian statistics in such a world than actually grok frequentist statistics right now).
You could well be right. I’m pessimistic about this because I remember seeing lots of people at school & university recoiling from any statistical topic more advanced than calculating means and drawing histograms. If they were being taught about conjugate priors & hyperparameters I’d expect them to react as unenthusiastically as if they were being taught about confidence levels and maximum likelihood. But I don’t have any rock solid evidence for that hunch.
I think that teaching Bayesian methods would itself raise the general statistical competence of scientists as a side effect, among other things because the meaning of p-values is seriously counter-intuitive (so more scientists would actually grok Bayesian statistics in such a world than actually grok frequentist statistics right now).
You could well be right. I’m pessimistic about this because I remember seeing lots of people at school & university recoiling from any statistical topic more advanced than calculating means and drawing histograms. If they were being taught about conjugate priors & hyperparameters I’d expect them to react as unenthusiastically as if they were being taught about confidence levels and maximum likelihood. But I don’t have any rock solid evidence for that hunch.