Thursday, October 30, 2014

Epistemological irritation of the day

The text for today's (very short) sermon is:

"A direct test of the hypothesis is looking for significance in the relationship between [one variable] and {another variable]."

No, no, no, no, no. Theory makes predictions about signs of coefficients, not about significance levels, which also depend on minor details such as the sample size and the amount of variation in the independent variable of interest present in the data.

Ugh.

Addendum: academic readers will know from the season that the text is taken from someone's job market paper.

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