Keith O’Rourke’s final published paper: “Statistics as a social activity: Attitudes toward amalgamating evidence”

Keith O’Rourke passed away two years ago. Here’s his obituary, which was sent to me by Bart Harvey:

Lover of earth, wood, water and fire, Keith left us after a brief illness on November 27, 2022. Born to Evelyn and Frank O’Rourke, he was the second of four sons. He met Marlene and they shared their life together for 39 years.

Keith worked in landscaping throughout his undergraduate years at the University of Toronto, then at Moore Business Forms, and in the western and northern provinces and territories in the field of compressed air before returning to UofT to complete and MBA and undertake an MSc. For many years he worked as a biostatistician at the Toronto General Hospital and the Ottawa Hospital on numerous studies in the fields of cancer, diabetes, SARS and infectious diseases research before completing a PhD at Oxford University in 2004. Having worked at Duke University, McGill and Queen’s, he joined Health Canada in the late 2000’s as a biostatistician, initially in health care and then in pesticide management. A conscientious intellectual and deep-thinker, Keith endeavoured to make our world a better and safer place.

Known to enjoy the occasional three fingers of Glenfiddich or an IPA, Keith pondered the mysteries of health and safety while taking longs walks in nature, nurturing many maple, birch and oak saplings, cutting up downed trees at our cottage in the Lanark Highlands, building bonfires and stoking every wood stove he had access to. A black belt in Kung Fu, and an assistant coach in boxing at Oxford he was known to jump in the ring and spar with up-and-coming kick-boxers into his mid-sixties, until Covid ended access to the ring.

We had an unpublished project together which we had not touched since 2016. I recently revised the paper, and it will be published. The article was originally titled, “Attitudes toward amalgamating evidence in statistics”; the final version is called, “Statistics as a social activity: Attitudes toward amalgamating evidence,” and here’s the abstract:

Amalgamation of evidence in statistics is done in several ways. Within a study, multiple observations are combined by averaging or as factors in a likelihood or prediction algorithm. In multilevel modeling or Bayesian analysis, population or prior information are combined with data using the weighted averaging derived from probability modeling. In a scientific research project, inferences from data analysis are interpreted in light of mechanistic models and substantive theories. Within a scholarly or applied research community, data and conclusions from separate laboratories are amalgamated through a series of steps including peer review, meta-analysis, review articles, and replication studies.

These issues have been discussed for many years in the philosophy of science and statistics, gaining attention in recent decades first with the renewed popularity of Bayesian inference and then with concerns about the replication crisis in science. In this article, we review amalgamation of statistical evidence from different perspectives, connecting the foundations of statistics to the social processes of validation, criticism, and consensus building.

I’m pretty sure that this will be Keith’s final published article. I very much regretted not having him around when revising the paper; we would’ve had lots to talk about.