But perhaps the bigger problem is the way that Fisher’s statistical philosophy tends to conceive of the world. It emphasizes the objective purity of the experiment—every hypothesis could be tested to a perfect conclusion if only enough data were collected. However, in order to achieve that purity, it denies the need for Bayesian priors or any other sort of messy real-world context. These methods neither require nor encourage us to think about the plausibility of our hypothesis: the idea that cigarettes cause lung cancer competes on a level playing field with the idea that toads predict
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