About Critical Values

Arguments About Values

Arguments are more or less persuasive depending on the values their outcomes promote and demote. This idea, closely related to Perelman’s ideas work on argumentation, has been formally modeled by Bench-Capon in his well-known Value-Based Argumentation Frameworks, based on Dung’s abstract argumentation. In this paper, the question is addressed how arguments about which values are promoted and de...

What values are critical?

Chemistry and hematology laboratories long ago developed policies and procedures for so-called " critical values. " These policies ensured timely verbal communications for pre-defined test results understood to reflect life-threatening therapeutically remediable conditions. The critical values concept has penetrated anatomic pathology but only in specific limited settings, usually when an abnor...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

A Critical Assessment of Simulated Critical Values

There is a wide variety of statistical problems (e.g., unit root and cointegration tests) where hypothesis testing involves the use of simulated rather than theoretical critical values. We argue that in practice the number of replications used to simulate critical values is often insufficient to provide the degree of precision that is implied. In particular, the number of replications needed is...

The debate about p-values

The p-value is the most widely used statistical concept in biomedical research. Recently, there are controversies over its utility and over the possible relationship between p-value misuse and the relatively high proportion of published medical research that cannot be replicated. In this paper, we introduce the p-value in layman's terms and explain its randomness and limitations. However, we al...