It is not clear to me that point estimates should ever be published. It fools one into thinking that it is the "mostly likely" purportedly "true value". But this is wrong.
Consider a bin filled with many many marbles/beads. Who knows how many? There are white beads and red beds. (There might be purple or orange beads.) We do not know the …
It is not clear to me that point estimates should ever be published. It fools one into thinking that it is the "mostly likely" purportedly "true value". But this is wrong.
Consider a bin filled with many many marbles/beads. Who knows how many? There are white beads and red beds. (There might be purple or orange beads.) We do not know the proportion. We dip a paddle in and take a sample (technically mechanical sample but we may pretend it is random). We have done _a_ trial. We count and find a proportion. (We hope we are good counters and have not made a mistake in our count. But mistakes will happen.)
Is the proportion of red beads in the paddle the true value? No.
Does it make sense to think of the counted proportion in the paddle as the most likely value? No.
Can we say that the counted proportion is "close" to the true value? Well, that depends on how big your paddle is.
But you are not a professional bead counter. You want to know the proportion for a specific reason. So you will really want to know where are these beads coming from and how will these beads be used and what happens if there are the wrong color beads in the next phase of action. You require substantive knowledge of the underlying process.
You are also men and women of action. You want to _do_ something. But sometimes doing something does not actually make things better.
I think 95% intervals are too small,
99.7% at least. We are not making Guinness beer. Medicine deals with humans. But, I will stop here because the topic is too large to work out in a substack comment.
It is not clear to me that point estimates should ever be published. It fools one into thinking that it is the "mostly likely" purportedly "true value". But this is wrong.
Consider a bin filled with many many marbles/beads. Who knows how many? There are white beads and red beds. (There might be purple or orange beads.) We do not know the proportion. We dip a paddle in and take a sample (technically mechanical sample but we may pretend it is random). We have done _a_ trial. We count and find a proportion. (We hope we are good counters and have not made a mistake in our count. But mistakes will happen.)
Is the proportion of red beads in the paddle the true value? No.
Does it make sense to think of the counted proportion in the paddle as the most likely value? No.
Can we say that the counted proportion is "close" to the true value? Well, that depends on how big your paddle is.
But you are not a professional bead counter. You want to know the proportion for a specific reason. So you will really want to know where are these beads coming from and how will these beads be used and what happens if there are the wrong color beads in the next phase of action. You require substantive knowledge of the underlying process.
You are also men and women of action. You want to _do_ something. But sometimes doing something does not actually make things better.
I think 95% intervals are too small,
99.7% at least. We are not making Guinness beer. Medicine deals with humans. But, I will stop here because the topic is too large to work out in a substack comment.