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Comment by RA_Fisher | Hacker News Reader

Yes, if you read further on the blog, you'll see I'm more than slightly denigrating. I read a book recently called The Cult of Statistical Significance and it's really turned me against Fisher. Not only do I see his methods as sub-standard to Bayesian analysis, he was really mean and disparaging himself to those folks. It's interesting, my username is what it is because he used to be my hero! Just 6 months ago, I really considered him to be the father of modern science. Now I basically see his work as mostly enabling mediocre scientists to rise through the ranks. This is what I mean by that: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-c...

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I've spent my career thinking about these same issues. And certainly Fisher was, well, abrasive to put it mildly. I've read much of his early work and I think the intended context has mostly been lost. Many modern statisticians ( of the "frequentist" persuasion ) use a strange and awkward combination of fisherian and neyman-pearson. We talk about "p-values" but then interpret them as hypothesis tests with long-term error probabilities ( Fisher disavowed this interpretation of p-values, and insisted they did not have a long run probabilistic interpretation but were a measure only of evidence against the null in the particular experiment. ) I think Fisher gets a bad rap for a lot of later bastardization of his work. ( I'm sure it did not help that he was not a likable person, or his valid but misguided and testimony about tobacco. )

Still, I'm sympathetic to your position and can understand how you'd come to that way of thinking. I'm not convinced even a diehard Bayesian would completely disagree with Fisher's more restricted and stringent interpretation of p-values. Or at least they would see it as a big step up from the more common usage you are referencing.

When did ideas get muddied by personality? I see this in the whole Ender's Game debate and in this Fisher debate. We need to compare ideas outside of the personality THAN we can separate the idea for the person.

In our history (Historical Philosophy/Theology Major) you would be apsolutely shocked at the lives of great thinkers and disapprove so much of their lives but MOST people don't know. This is the issue with open lives we know so much more about people. It is never just a book or an idea we can learn maybe to much???

What a silly thing to think. I think you'll find that Fisher's development of likelihood and explicit probabilistic modeling is rather important in Bayesian statistics. You'll also find that Fisher was not only one of the top 3 if not the 20th century's most important theoretical statistician, but that he was one of the top 3 if not the 20th century's most important theoretical geneticist. This sort of fanboy Bayesianism is really rather embarrassing.

Yes, I really do value and see the genius in likelihood, but Fisher is idolized in a really unhealthy way in statistics IMO. I'm a Bayesian fanboy because it works. I spent > 1 yr. trying to get Fisher's testing framework to yield business success. Positive results came, but were always a slog and more often than not it's use failed. As soon as I switched to Bayesian methods, consistent success started happening. It's exciting.

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