Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I read a survey once, that found that a huge number of PhDs/researchers in the studied sample gave an incorrect definition for what a "95% confidence interval" (/p-value, etc) actually means, and that several popular introductory textbooks defined it incorrectly as well. Wish I bookmarked it.

At bare minimum, journals need to require that researchers publish all their data alongside every paper, so statistical analyses can be redone and flaws can be spotted.



I think you may be talking about "Mindless statistics" by Gigerenzer. He has some surveys about p-values and how radically wrong they are usually interpreted.

>At bare minimum, journals need to require that researchers publish all their data alongside every paper, so statistical analyses can be redone and flaws can be spotted.

Absolutely.


P-values work great when they’re super low, experiments run at a human-scale frequency, and hypotheses are extremely precise in their predictions, e.g. some physics.

If you run an experiment a day and get p < 10^-9, your priors, your multiple hypothesis correction, even your interpretation of p-values approximately don’t matter. Running social sciences experiments with p < 0.05 threshold is where things get weird.


Did you read the article?

>even your interpretation of p-values approximately don’t matter

"Small number means good" is not a sufficient working understanding of p-values for doing science.


But what if it’s really small?


It's completely irrelevant if you don't understand how to interpret it. It is not a number which tells you how correct your hypothesis is.

That is literally mindless statistics. Which coincidentally is the name of the article I talked about. Did you read it?

(In a social science, if your p-value is 1E-5 or something, the most likely interpretation is that you are doing something very wrong)


I did. My statement was hyperbolic. More directly: P-values are more resilient to misuse at their extremes.


ok


probably this article: Hoekstra, R., Morey, R.D., Rouder, J.N. et al. Robust misinterpretation of confidence intervals. Psychon Bull Rev 21, 1157–1164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0572-3

another good article on misinterpretation of p-values and confidence intervals is: Greenland, S., Senn, S.J., Rothman, K.J. et al. Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations. Eur J Epidemiol 31, 337–350 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-016-0149-3


While I agree on the data point, it would kill so much research. It is bad that a lot of research validation basically comes down to "trust me guys", but with data being both very valuable and often times highly sensitive, it can be really difficult to just publish the data along with the research.

A decent compromise would be to at least require meta-data to sufficiently exclude some flaws. A different approach could be to have researchers document and publish the process of th research, similar to a git-repo with the main branch being completely off limits to history-rewriting.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: