Chapter XXV: Baselines And The Null Hypothesis | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]
“There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.” – Thomas Sowell I “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens II “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” – Pierre Simon Laplace (as paraphrased by Carl Sagan) III Baselines (or base-rates ) are an acknowledgment of the fact that, totally aside from a given intervention, many effects are occurring in some normal rate all of the time. Imagine, for example, that you give drug x to 10,000 people for a period of a year in order to figure out if it is dangerous. Then imagine that 10 people in the study died. One might be tempted to worry that the drug has a ...