. All science entails human judgement, and using statistical models doesn’t relieve us of that necessity. Working with misspecified models, the scientific value of significance testing is actually zero — even though you’re making valid statistical inferences! Statistical models and concomitant significance tests are no substitutes for doing real science. In its standard form, a […]
Statistics & Econometrics
It is instructive to consider cases in which most people readily accept causal claims in the absence of randomized experiments. Nowadays, few people doubt the effects of tobacco smoking on lung cancer. But in the 1950s, tobacco lobbyists embraced the idea that a genetic predisposition caused both a tendency to smoke and lung cancer … […]
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), while useful in some contexts, are often overvalued in economics and social sciences. My critique centres on the following key points: 1. Lack of External Validity RCTs often suffer from problems of external validity, meaning that their results cannot easily be generalized beyond the specific experimental conditions. In the controlled environment […]
There have been over four decades of econometric research on business cycles … But the significance of the formalization becomes more difficult to identify when it is assessed from the applied perspective … The wide conviction of the superiority of the methods of the science has converted the econometric community largely to a group of […]
As social scientists — and economists — we have to confront the all-important question of how to handle uncertainty and randomness. Should we define randomness with probability? If we do, we have to accept that to speak of randomness we also have to presuppose the existence of nomological probability machines, since probabilities cannot be spoken […]
Beyond the significant financial expenses required to conduct RCTs … critics have raised concerns about considerable opportunity costs associated with their privileged status in programme and policy assessment. These costs result from how an over-emphasis on experimental evaluations in evidence generation systematically undermines alternative research methods potentially better equipped to answer questions about causal mechanisms (or […]
. Below you will find a little Python script yours truly made to simulate a betting scenario as a Markov process and visualise how the total amount of money changes over time. This model highlights that, due to a higher probability of losing, the total money will generally trend downwards over a large number of […]
. Added: And here’s a little Python code yours truly has put together so you can play around and plot Beta distributions: import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt from scipy.stats import beta # Given data total_flips = 100 observed_heads = 60 observed_tails = 40 # Adjusted to match 100 flips # Calculating the […]
. Here’s a somewhat simplified Python script of the case, and as you can see, the expected median wealth is quickly trending downwards: