The Illusion of Attaining Improbability

One problem arises from a misapplication of deductive syllogistic reasoning. Falk and Greenbaum (in press) called this the “illusion of probabilistic proof by contradiction” or the “illusion of attaining improbability.” Gigerenzer (1993) called it the “permanent illusion” and the “Bayesian Id’s wishful thinking,” part of the “hybrid logic” of contemporary statistical inference—a mishmash of Fisher and Neyman-Pearson, with invalid Bayesian interpretation.