Ronald Fisher

Demographic changes—including aging of the population, changes in ethnic composition, and regional population shifts—have affected both service demand and productivity of the existing revenue structure. The decline of manufacturing and the corresponding growing importance of service, information, and financial industries also have had a dramatic effect. States have discovered that their tax structures may be poorly designed for the new economy and that reforms to the tax system are elusive. The increasing income inequality resulting in large part from the economic restructuring has increased the demand for a variety of state and local services, notably welfare and education. The rising relative cost of energy and increasing environmental concerns are additional factors pushing states and localities to develop or adopt new technologies for service provision. Certainly the recession has had a severe impact, but even after the economy recovers, state and local governments will continue to be affected by these long-term trends.

This article analyzes the problem of induction from its origins in Aristotle, naturally through Hume and Popper, to the frequentist and Bayesian concepts of mathematical statistics. Thus it tackles Popper's arguments about the impossibility of inductive probability and the contemporary approaches to the theory of statistical estimation. Its two most important conclusions are: 1. that Popper fails to prove that the inductive probability is impossible, and 2. that in the context of mathematical statistics statistical inferences are only deductive inferences.

This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifi-able, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory. O NE striking difference between the intelligent design (ID) position and earlier forms of creationism is that ID is often formulated as a comparatively modest claim. For example, Young Earth Creationism denied that human beings share common ancestors with other species while affirming that God was the designer of organisms and that life on earth is at most 10,000 years old. ID, at least when stated in a minimalistic form, is officially neutral on these three claims (Behe 1996, 2005). The single thes...

The Law of Large Numbers is one of the greatest achievements in the history of mathematics. In this article, I reconstruct the process from the Bernoullian formulation of the Propositio Principalis in the Ars conjectandi to the current form of Bernoulli's Theorem. Then I discuss Bernoulli's main aim: to infer probabilities from observed frequencies. This question, which is known as the inverse use of probability, is shown to be impossible in the context of Bernoulli's probability theory. Finally, after presenting the historical debate on this issue, I conclude with the analysis of the problem of statistical inference and claim that, despite its failure, Jakob Bernoulli illuminates the basis of the modern theory of statistical inference.

In this paper I argue that statistical inferences are deductive ones. Thus I reject Ronald Fisher's inductive view of theoretical statistics and I adhere to Jerzy Neyman's deductive approach. Moreover I assert that both Neyman-Pearson's testing theory and Fisher's tests of significance properly belong to decision theory.
Furthermore I disagree with Ian Hacking's evidentialist criticisms of Neyman-Pearson's theory of statistics and with Deborah Mayo's interpretation of Neyman-Pearson testing theory as a model of learning from experience.