The problem with a P-centric world
10 disadvantages of null-hypothisis testing:
1. The alternative hypotheis is not evaluated,
2. The null hypothesis is uninformative, often ridiculous (e.g., males and females are different – duh!)
3. It assumes asymptotic distributions,
4. It assumes thresholds of ‘evidence’, but
5. A P-value is not evidential, and
6. A P-value is not a strength of evidence, 7. The world is not explained by single models, 8. A null-hypothesis test has no ability to add and quantify model selection uncertainty, and 9. No ability to deal with large systems or datasets, and, lastly, 10. It has proven to be unuseful in a court of law!
Quite some time ago I blogged about a ‘new’ book published by Oxford University Press and edited by Navjot Sodhi and Paul Ehrlich called Conservation Biology for Allin which Barry Brook and I wrote a chapter entitled The conservation biologist’s toolbox – principles for the design and analysis of conservation studies.
More recently, I attended the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Bali where I gave a 30-minute talk about the chapter, and I was overwhelmed with positive responses from the audience. The only problem was that 30 minutes wasn’t even remotely long enough to talk about all the topics we covered in the chapter, and I had to skip over a lot of material.
So…, I’ve blogged about the book, and now I thought I’d blog about the chapter.
The topics we cover are varied, but we really only deal…
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