3 ms·
These seem like two different things. Testing many different optimizations is not the same experiment; it's many different experiments. The SE equivalent of the
by jean_lannes 1y ago
These seem like two different things. Testing many different optimizations is not the same experiment; it's many different experiments. The SE equivalent of the practice being described would be repeatedly benchmarking code without making any changes and reporting results only from the favorable runs.
- pizlonator 1y agoDoesn’t matter if it’s the same experiment or not. Say I’m after p<0.05. That means that if I try 40 different purported optimizations that are all actually neutral duds, one of them will seem like a speedup and one of them will seem like a slowdown, on average.
- daveFNbuck 1y agoThat's not p hacking. That's just the nature of p values. P hacking is when you do things to make a particular experiment more likely to show as a success.