Miscellaneous Science – StatsBlogs

The garden of 603,979,752 forking paths

Andrew — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 13:18:43 +0000

Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski write: The widespread use of digital technologies by young people has spurred speculation that their regular use negatively impacts psychological well-being. Current empirical evidence supporting this idea is largely based on secondary analyses of large-scale social datasets. Though these datasets provide a valuable resource for highly powered investigations, their many […]

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We should be open-minded, but not selectively open-minded.

Andrew — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 19:19:44 +0000

I wrote this post awhile ago but it just appeared . . . I liked this line so much I’m posting it on its own: We should be open-minded, but not selectively open-minded. This is related to the research incumbency effect and all sorts of other things we’ve talked about over the years. There’s a […]

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How to think about reported life hacks?

Andrew — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 13:37:31 +0000

Interesting juxtaposition as two interesting pieces of spam happened to appear in my inbox on the same day: 1. Subject line “Why the power stance will be your go-to move in 2019”: The power stance has been highlighted as one way to show your dominance at work and move through the ranks. While moving up […]

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How statistics is used to crush (scientific) dissent.

Andrew — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 16:03:53 +0000

Lakeland writes: When we interpret powerful as political power, I think it’s clear that Classical Statistics has the most political power, that is, the power to get people to believe things and change policy or alter funding decisions etc… Today Bayes is questioned at every turn, and ridiculed for being “subjective” with a focus on […]

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Question 8 of our Applied Regression final exam (and solution to question 7)

Andrew — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 13:40:10 +0000

Here’s question 8 of our exam: 8. Out of a random sample of 50 Americans, zero report having ever held political office. From this information, give a 95% confidence interval for the proportion of Americans who have ever held political office. And the solution to question 7: 7. You conduct an experiment in which some […]

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Why edit a journal? More generally, how to contribute to scientific discussion?

Andrew — Thu, 30 May 2019 13:46:26 +0000

The other day I wrote: Journal editing is a volunteer job, and people sign up for it because they want to publish exciting new work, or maybe because they enjoy the power trip, or maybe out of a sense of duty—but, in any case, they typically aren’t in it for the controversy. Jon Baron, editor […]

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Let’s publish everything.

Andrew — Wed, 29 May 2019 13:52:05 +0000

The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins: How does the current replication crisis, along with other recent psychological trends, affect scientific creativity? To answer this question, we consider current debates regarding replication through the lenses of creativity research and theory. Both […]

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They’re working for the clampdown

Andrew — Mon, 27 May 2019 13:28:37 +0000

This is just disgraceful: powerful academics using their influence to suppress (“clamp down on”) dissent. They call us terrorists, they lie about us in their journals, and they plot to clamp down on us. I can’t say at this point that I’m surprised to see this latest, but it saddens and angers me nonetheless to […]

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Crystallography Corner: The result is difficult to reproduce, but the result is still valid.

Andrew — Sun, 26 May 2019 13:09:37 +0000

Joel Bernstein writes: I just finished reading your oped article on reproducibility in science. As an experimental scientist – more precisely a chemical crystallographer – I have had to deal with this kind of situation a number of times, and at least two examples may serve as the possible exceptions to your rules. One of […]

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Pushing the guy in front of the trolley

Andrew — Thu, 23 May 2019 13:00:54 +0000

So. I was reading the London Review of Books the other day and came across this passage by the philosopher Kieran Setiya: Some of the most striking discoveries of experimental philosophers concern the extent of our own personal inconsistencies . . . how we respond to the trolley problem is affected by the details of […]

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Hey, people are doing the multiverse!

Andrew — Sat, 18 May 2019 13:53:11 +0000

Elio Campitelli writes: I’ve just saw this image in a paper discussing the weight of evidence for a “hiatus” in the global warming signal and immediately thought of the garden of forking paths. From the paper: Tree representation of choices to represent and test pause-periods. The ‘pause’ is defined as either no-trend or a slow-trend. […]

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“In 1997 Latanya Sweeney dramatically demonstrated that supposedly anonymized data was not anonymous,” but “Over 20 journals turned down her paper . . . and nobody wanted to fund privacy research that might reach uncomfortable conclusions.”

Andrew — Thu, 16 May 2019 13:29:55 +0000

Tom Daula writes: I think this story from John Cook is a different perspective on replication and how scientists respond to errors. In particular the final paragraph: There’s a perennial debate over whether it is best to make security and privacy flaws public or to suppress them. The consensus, as much as there is a […]

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“How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions” . . . and still stays around even after it’s been retracted

Andrew — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 13:14:37 +0000

Chuck Jackson points to two items of possible interest: Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions, by Richard Harris. Review here by Leonard Freedman. Retractions do not work very well, by Ken Cor and Gaurav Sood. This post by Tyler Cowen brought this paper to my attention. Here’s a […]

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Impact of published research on behavior and avoidable fatalities

Andrew — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 13:00:05 +0000

In a paper entitled, “Impact of published research on behavior and avoidable fatalities,” Addison Kramer, Alexandra Kirk, Faizaan Easton, and Bertram Hester write: There has long been speculation of an “informational backfire effect,” whereby the publication of questionable scientific claims can lead to behavioral changes that are counterproductive in the aggregate. Concerns of informational backfire […]

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Should we talk less about bad social science research and more about bad medical research?

Andrew — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 13:51:14 +0000

Paul Alper pointed me to this news story, “Harvard Calls for Retraction of Dozens of Studies by Noted Cardiac Researcher: Some 31 studies by Dr. Piero Anversa contain fabricated or falsified data, officials concluded. Dr. Anversa popularized the idea of stem cell treatment for damaged hearts.” I replied: Ahhh, Harvard . . . the reporter […]

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“Retire Statistical Significance”: The discussion.

Andrew — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:03:30 +0000

So, the paper by Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland, and Blake McShane that we discussed a few weeks ago has just appeared online as a comment piece in Nature, along with a letter with hundreds (or is it thousands?) of supporting signatures. Following the first circulation of that article, the authors of that article and some […]

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My two talks in Montreal this Friday, 22 Mar

Andrew — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 15:00:40 +0000

McGill University Biostatistics seminar, Purvis Hall, 102 Pine Ave. West, Room 25, 1-2pm Fri 22 Mar: Resolving the Replication Crisis Using Multilevel Modeling In recent years we have come to learn that many prominent studies in social science and medicine, conducted at leading research institutions, published in top journals, and publicized in respected news outlets, […]

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Statistical-significance thinking is not just a bad way to publish, it’s also a bad way to think

Andrew — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 13:19:06 +0000

Eric Loken writes: The table below was on your blog a few days ago, with the clear point about p-values (and even worse the significance versus non-significance) being a poor summary of data. The thought I’ve had lately, working with various groups of really smart and thoughtful researchers, is that Table 4 is also a […]

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Not Dentists named Dennis, but Physicists named Li studying Li

Andrew — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 14:41:09 +0000

Charles Jackson writes: I was spurred to do this search by reading an article in the 30 Mar 2018 issue of Science. The article was: Self-heating–induced healing of lithium dendrites by Lu Li et al. Wikipedia says that more than 93 million people in China have the surname Li. I found 62 articles on Lithium […]

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(back to basics:) How is statistics relevant to scientific discovery?

Andrew — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 14:01:15 +0000

Someone pointed me to this remark by psychology researcher Daniel Gilbert: Publication is not canonization. Journals are not gospels. They are the vehicles we use to tell each other what we saw (hence “Letters” & “proceedings”). The bar for communicating to each other should not be high. We can decide for ourselves what to make […]

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