The flawed reasoning behind the Replication Crisis

Medical students are now routinely taught the diagnostic importance of base incidence rates. Bayes’ theorem helps them properly contextualize test results and avoid unnecessarily alarming patients who test positive for something rare. To leave out that final ingredient, the Bayesian prior probability, would be to commit a fallacy of the same species as the one in the Sally Clark case. The crisis of replication has exposed the fact, which has been the shameful secret of statistics for decades now, that the same fallacy is at the heart of modern scientific practice.

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