Statistical evidence for revised standards

In yet another permutation of the original title (!), Andrew Gelman posted the answer Val Johnson sent him after our (submitted)  letter to PNAS. As Val did not send me a copy (although Andrew did!), I will not reproduce it here and I rather refer the interested readers to Andrews’ blog… In addition to Andrew’s (sensible) points, here are a few idle (post-X’mas and pre-skiing) reflections:

• “evidence against a false null hypothesis accrues exponentially fast” makes me wonder in which metric this exponential rate (in γ?) occurs;
• that “most decision-theoretic analyses of the optimal threshold to use for declaring a significant finding would lead to evidence thresholds that are substantially greater than 5 (and probably also greater 25)” is difficult to accept as an argument since there is no trace of a decision-theoretic argument in the whole paper;
• Val rejects our minimaxity argument on the basis that “[UMPBTs] do not involve minimization of maximum loss” but the prior that corresponds to those tests is minimising the integrated probability of not rejecting at threshold level γ, a loss function integrated against parameter and observation, a Bayes risk in other words… Point masses or spike priors are clearly characteristics of minimax priors. Furthermore, the additional argument that “in most applications, however, a unique loss function/prior distribution combination does not exist” has been used by many to refute the Bayesian perspective and makes me wonder what are the arguments left in using a (pseudo-)Bayesian approach;
• the next paragraph is pure tautology: the fact that “no other test, based on either a subjectively or objectively specified alternative hypothesis, is as likely to produce a Bayes factor that exceeds the specified evidence threshold” is a paraphrase of the definition of UMPBTs, not an argument. I do not see we should solely “worry about false negatives”, since minimising those should lead to a point mass on the null (or, more seriously, should not lead to the minimax-like selection of the prior under the alternative).