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> we found a very interesting biological pattern in the data Isn't it related to p-hacking? Get lot of data, search for a pattern then publish some theory the
by arkh 9y ago
> we found a very interesting biological pattern in the data
Isn't it related to p-hacking? Get lot of data, search for a pattern then publish some theory the pattern would "prove". Instead of having a theory first, setting up experiments which can disprove it then analyzing the data from those experiments.
- mercer 9y agoI'd say if they were explicit about using the data to construct a theory, it's okay, no?
- biomcgary 9y agoThe observed pattern exactly fit into a previously established hypothesis and was totally unexpected. I did not slice and dice the data with multiple statistical tests. The only way it could have been related to p-hacking is that I am familiar with a bunch of biological theories and could recognize data patterns that are compatible with any of them. So, maybe a Bonferroni-type correction of 30-70x (i.e., number of theories my internal neural net has been trained on)?