Atheists? And Everyone else, Have you heard of the Null Hypothesis?

Question

I wonder what some of you think of this Video. Has anyone ever heard of the Null Hypothesis?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmdNOC94USE

Answer 1

That was cool! Thanks for posting. You're lucky they didn't pull this, they pulled my atheist video.

atheist

Answer 2

Of course .... scientific research would not have a leg to stand on without it!

For those who are unfamiliar and without doing people's heads in with the more abstract nature of statistics the null hypothesis is:

The Null Hypothesis is that A does not exist
The experimental hypothesis is that A does exist
In science, we test the Null Hypothesis

So basically, we try to 'disprove' that A does not exist

That is a very overlysimplified overview....

Here is a nice example of how you would apply this to comparing attributes in two groups (adapted but slightly changed from an example in wikipedia):

If we want to compare the maths test scores of two random samples of men and women (so testing to see if there is a difference between scores depending on gender), a null hypothesis would be that the mean score of the male population was the same as the mean score of the female population:

H0 : μ1 = μ2
where:

H0 = the null hypothesis
μ1 = the mean (average) of population 1, and
μ2 = the mean (average) of population 2.

If μ1 differs significantly from μ2 then we can say that the null hypothesis is not true

however if μ1 = μ2 (within a certain error margin) then we can say that the null hypothesis has been retained

Answer 3

Atheism is pretty much based on the null hypothesis.

Answer 4

Yes!... For atheism and reasoning... In a nutshell!

Answer 5

Nice video.
I'm still not sure if I believe in mermaids or not though ;)

Answer 6

not bad

Answer 7

Welcome to science.