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This paper [1] points out that commonly-used measures of statistical significance are downright meaningless when additional degrees of freedom are hidden in the

• jules 15y ago
  It's even worse than that paper describes and this is something that every statistics 101 class worth its salt points out: if you are allowed to choose a statistical test after you've gathered your data you can prove any conclusion you want with arbitrarily high confidence. Note that the paper does not list choosing a test before you gather the data as a requirement. The only way to do meaningful statistics is the way splat describes: describe exactly how you're going to analyze it before you gather the data, then send the paper to a journal which decides whether to publish it before the data has been gathered, and then complete the paper by actually doing the experiment and adding the data to the paper.