BTW, some of my thinking on this is informed by reading Deborah Mayo’s “Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge”. It’s not a very fun book, but it’s interesting to me because it aims to be a vigorous defense of frequentism and condemnation of Bayesianism; from Cosma Shalizi’s review I gathered that it would be a useful antidote against Bayesian groupthink.
The parts in Mayo that jiggled my thinking on placebos are where she insists very firmly that the point of experimental trials is to put hypotheses to severe tests, and that this mainly consists of amplifying the differences between “actual” and “artifactual” effects.
BTW, some of my thinking on this is informed by reading Deborah Mayo’s “Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge”. It’s not a very fun book, but it’s interesting to me because it aims to be a vigorous defense of frequentism and condemnation of Bayesianism; from Cosma Shalizi’s review I gathered that it would be a useful antidote against Bayesian groupthink.
The parts in Mayo that jiggled my thinking on placebos are where she insists very firmly that the point of experimental trials is to put hypotheses to severe tests, and that this mainly consists of amplifying the differences between “actual” and “artifactual” effects.