A statistical guide for the ethically perplexed

About this book

"Preface I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like. { Artemus Ward (from a newspaper advertisement, 1863) Our title is taken from the seminal work of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (1904, M. Friedlander, Trans.). This monumental contribution was written as a three-volume letter to a student and was an attempt by Maimonides to reconcile his Aristotelian philosophical views with those of Jewish law. In an analogous way, this book tries to reconcile the areas of statistics and the behavioral (and related social and biomedical) sciences through the standards for ethical practice, de ned as being in accord with the accepted rules or standards for right conduct that govern a discipline. The standards for ethical practice are what we try to instill in students through the methodology courses we o er, with particular emphasis on the graduate and undergraduate statistics sequence generally required in all of the sciences. It is our hope that the principal general education payo for competent statistics instruction is an increase in people's ability to be critical and ethical consumers and producers of the statistical reasoning and analyses they will face over the course of their careers. Maimonides intended his Guide for an educated readership, with the ideas concealed from the masses. He writes in the introduction: \A sensible man should not demand of me, or hope that when we mention a subject, …

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