5 ms·
I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the origina
by capnrefsmmat 13y ago
I am sometimes amused to read failed replication studies which do not calculate their own statistical power -- so they do not know whether, assuming the original study was correct, they will have the sample size to reliably detect an effect. A failed replication then says nothing about the original conclusions.
Statistical error is a hobby of mine. The Economist mentions a few pervasive errors, but there are many more. I've been writing a guide:
http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/ http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/
One amusing example is the oft-quoted statistic that 3 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. The true figure is several orders of magnitude smaller. Follow the link for more details:
http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-arms-against-the-base-rate-fallacy http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/p-value.html#taking-up-ar...
- guelo 13y agoNice article, but copying an xkcd image without copying the image's tooltip text is criminal.
- andrewflnr 13y agoUm, you mean in the sarcastic sense?
- PakG1 13y agoThe tooltip text is half the joke a lot of the time.
- olalonde 13y agoWhich is: "'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'"
- cousin_it 13y agoThat's great work and I want more of it!
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoThe version I linked to is about half the size of my work-in-progress, and I'd be happy to share the draft with anyone interested in 25,000+ words on doing stats wrong. My email is in my profile. Right now I'm a first-semester graduate student in statistics, so my writing has slowed down a bit; once I get some confidence in what I've learned I'll try to wrap it up. I'm not sure how or where to publish it, though.
- icelancer 13y agoStart a blog and publish it openly. That's what I will be doing with my lab research. My mind was swayed when a friend's brother (aaronsw) took his life for at least partially this reason.