X informs me of a new effort, “Peer community in . . .”, which describes itself as “a free recommendation process of published and unpublished scientific papers.” So far this exists in only one field, Evolutionary Biology. But this looks like a great idea and I expect it will soon exist in statistics, political science, […] The post PCI Statistics: A preprint review peer community in statistics appeared first on…
Doug Puett writes: I am a 2012 QMSS [Columbia University Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences] grad who is currently trying to build a Data Science/Quantitative UX team, and was hoping for some advice. I am finding myself having a hard time finding people who are really interested in understanding people and who especially are excited […] The post This company wants to hire people who can program in R or…
A few days ago I shared my reactions to an op-ed by developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. Gopnik replied: As a regular reader of your blog, I thought you and your readers might be interested in a response to your very fair comments. In the original draft I had an extra few paragraphs (below) that speak […] The post How is a politician different from a 4-year-old? appeared first on Statistical…
John Carlin and I write: It is well known that even experienced scientists routinely misinterpret p-values in all sorts of ways, including confusion of statistical and practical significance, treating non-rejection as acceptance of the null hypothesis, and interpreting the p-value as some sort of replication probability or as the posterior probability that the null hypothesis […] The post Some natural solutions to the p-value communication problem—and why they won’t work.…
We’ve spent a lot of time during the past few years discussing the difficulty of interpreting “p less than .05” results from noisy studies. Standard practice is to just take the point estimate and confidence interval, but this is in general wrong in that it overestimates effect size (type M error) and can get the […] The post How to interpret “p = .06” in situations where you really really…
I’m a big fan of the work of Uri Simonsohn and his collaborators, but I don’t like the term “p-hacking” because it can be taken to imply an intention to cheat. The image of p-hacking is of a researcher trying test after test on the data until reaching the magic “p less than .05.” But, […] The post “P-hacking” and the intention-to-cheat effect appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…
From a couple years ago: In the context of a listserv discussion about replication in psychology experiments, someone wrote: The current best estimate of the effect size is somewhere in between the original study and the replication’s reported value. This conciliatory, split-the-difference statement sounds reasonable, and it might well represent good politics in the context […] The post A completely reasonable-sounding statement with which I strongly disagree appeared first on…
[cat picture] Laura Kapitula writes: I wanted to share a cute story that gave me a bit of hope. My daughter who is in 7th grade was doing her science project. She had designed an experiment comparing lemon batteries to potato batteries, a 2×4 design with lemons or potatoes as one factor and number of […] The post 7th graders trained to avoid Pizzagate-style data exploration—but is the training too…
From 2015: The conventional view: Hyp testing is all about rejection. The idea is that if you reject the null hyp at the 5% level, you have a win, you have learned that a certain null model is false and science has progressed, either in the glamorous “scientific revolution” sense that you’ve rejected a central […] The post What hypothesis testing is all about. (Hint: It’s not what you think.)…
Lionel Hertzog writes: In the method section of a recent Nature article in my field of research (diversity-ecosystem function) one can read the following: The inclusion of many predictors in statistical models increases the chance of type I error (false positives). To account for this we used a Bernoulli process to detect false discovery rates, […] The post The Bolt from the Blue appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference,…
