Comment.

The article presents the author's comments on researcher D. Basu's paper related to randomization analysis of experimental data. The scientist's experimental results contain evidence bearing on the superiority of the improved diet. He asks the statistician to evaluate this evidence. The statistician answers by computing a significance probability by means of researcher R.A. Fisher's randomization test. One of the scientist's goals is to obtain public confirmation for the superiority of the improved diet. If this can be accomplished with a minimum of fuss and assumption, preliminary to the detailed, model-based analysis, and without contradicting explicitly or implicitly the results of that analysis, so much the better. Here, the randomization test may be of use. The way in which "chance variability" enters into scientist's experiment should be carefully explicated by the scientist when he constructs the statistical model he will use for analyzing his results. The randomization test ignores this model and substitutes an alternative relation between chance and the experiment, based on a frequency distribution induced by the physical act that assigns animals to diets.