Travis Greene
1 min readApr 3, 2020

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Good article! Very clearly written. My only comment is that I’m not sure I would agree that the alpha (significance level) value is “arbitrary,” especially in the context of scientific inference. Since frequentist logic is about building scientific knowledge on the basis of a predetermined decision-making rule (supposedly set before seeing any data, as you mentioned), it seems quite important to me that we would not want to arbitrarily set our long-run probability of false positives (when the null is true… which is almost never the case in reality) too high. We should be very cautious if we wish to have strong foundations of knowledge. Otherwise, our entire foundation is shattered when we find out the initial results were based on false positives.

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Travis Greene

Thinking about the future of persons, personal data, and personalization. Connect with me @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/travis-greene/