3 ms·
What's funny about p-values and effect sizes is that the "good science", like physics, would routinely score 10^-6 or lower p-values, with models that explain n
by H8crilA 5y ago
What's funny about p-values and effect sizes is that the "good science", like physics, would routinely score 10^-6 or lower p-values, with models that explain nearly or even exactly 100% of the variance.
Having a p-value of 0.05 is incredibly weak, even if nobody is cheating. It's just a garbage process that's guaranteed to produce high % of falsehoods, where the exact % depends on the prior probability of starting with true hypotheses.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
I mean think about the Newtonian mechanics, there really isn't almost any room for error. And once the model was pushed into more and more extreme applications and errors were eventually spotted the theory was refined into new mechanics.
- clairity 5y agodespite the sophisticated math required, physics is also orders of magnitude simpler than biology, chemistry, or the social sciences, which is why physics models can reach that level of certainty and other sciences haven’t yet.
- _3u10 5y agoWe just expect different things from those sciences. Physical simulations go equally awry on the large scale, like predicting the weather a week out.
- dangle1 5y agoScience is an amazing but frustrating tool. Amazing in the sense that it is the only way to reliably learn more about what is happening around us. Frustrating because it is much slower than we'd like in providing reliable answers in many situations (pandemics, perhaps even climate change). And the gap between gathering observations and reaching agreed upon conclusions gets filled with normal but unhelpful human behaviors. It's especially frustrating in medicine, perhaps most in behavioral medicine, because there are so many degrees of freedom in human behavior and value judgments assigned to behaviors.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]