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Remember, if you throw 20 darts at random, one of them is probably going to be significant at the p < 0.05 level.
by cperciva 11y ago
Remember, if you throw 20 darts at random, one of them is probably going to be significant at the p < 0.05 level.
- ZeroFries 11y agoCan you explain what you mean by that?
- Afforess 11y ago0.05 significance has a 1 in 20 chance of being randomly occurring (1 / 0.05 = 20) and a result of statistical noise rather than evidence of a pattern. This is why reproducibility is important in science - future trials and tests will fail to reproduce the exact pattern of events needed to produce the statistical noise and so the null hypothesis will be accepted instead.