3 ms·
5σ seems like an unnecessarily high standard to this non-physicist; what's the rationale for that? At 5σ we could publish 1,000 major discoveries a year and ha
by haberman 14y ago
5σ seems like an unnecessarily high standard to this non-physicist; what's the rationale for that? At 5σ we could publish 1,000 major discoveries a year and have E[false discovery accepted] = 1,740 years.
- JonnieCache 14y agoI think it's mainly so they can be as condescending and smug as possible at interdisciplinary conferences.
- bermanoid 14y agoActually, it's because the rest of you "scientists" end up publishing bullshit results that you got by chance. I'm kind of joking - most other scientists don't collect enough data to have to worry about 1 in 10,000 events happening by chance. In medicine, though, I'm not joking at all - those guys publish absolute statistical garbage all the time, I hesitate to even consider it a science because the data dredging is so bad. I can "prove" just about anything if the publication standard is 95% significance...
- mattheww 14y agoThe two main rationales are that systematic uncertainties are historically under-estimated and that we are looking in many channels (more than 1000), so it would not be too hard to find a 3 or 4 sigma anomaly. The second part is the so-called "Look Elsewhere Effect." If you hit 5 sigma, you are fairly safe from either of these effects ruining your "discovery."
- _delirium 14y ago> The second part is the so-called "Look Elsewhere Effect." Also more generally known as the "multiple testing" problem, fwiw (not sure why it has a different name in physics, unless I'm missing a subtlety). It's a major problem in "big data" also, where people just data-dredge thousands of possible parameter choices and pairwise correlations, and then report the p<0.01 results that came up, even though you'd expect several false positives just by chance with that methodology.