Why the Medical Diagnostic Screening Perspective Misrepresents Frequentist Testing and Misdiagnoses the Replication Crisis

The replication crisis and the untrustworthiness of empirical evidence is often viewed through the lens of the Medical Diagnostic screening (MDS) perspective, conceived as a surrogate for Neyman-Pearson (N-P) testing. To shed light on this crisis theMDS Positive Predictive Value (PPV) is Metamorphosed into the M-PPV by identifying the false positive/negative probabilities with the type I/II error probabilities. The diagnosis based on M-PPV is that the untrustworthiness of empirical evidence stems from several misuses of N-P testing, including p-hacking, data-dredging, and cherry-picking. The appropriateness of the MDS perspective, as well as the ensuing diagnosis based on the M-PPV, are called into question since they invoke dubious analogies with N-P testing. It is argued that a more pertinent explanation is that the untrustworthiness of evidence stems from a much broader problem relating to the uninformed and recipe-like implementation of frequentist statistics without proper understanding of the invoked assumptions, limitations, and warranted evidential interpretations of the frequentist inference results. This broader perspective, in conjunction with the post-data severity evidential interpretation of the testing results, could potentially address the untrustworthiness of empirical evidence problem.