5 ms·
The Earth is Round (p < 0.05) (1994)
- nathell 12y agoSide note: while trying to submit this, I've noticed that the submission form doesn't escape less-than signs automatically. I had to manually escape the entity.
- Selfcommit 12y agoRelevant XKCD http://xkcd.com/1478/ http://xkcd.com/1478/
- joseraul 12y agoAlso http://xkcd.com/882/ http://xkcd.com/882/
- ikeboy 12y agoHypothesis: the submitter either came across the link while researching this xkcd, or remembered about the link after seeing the xkcd. Unfortunately I just realized I have no idea how to do statistics anymore, so we'll have to wait for the submitter to confirm.
- nathell 12y agoSubmitter here. The latter is correct.
- api 12y agoFrom 1994... that's depressing.
- jtth 12y agoThe discussions over the problems of frequentist statistics are old, old problems in which people have grown and died without settling. It seems like we're getting close, finally, now that Bayesian methods are becoming easier and easier.
- Chinjut 12y agoMind you, there are also a number of old, old discussions of the problems of Bayesian statistics, which I fully expect to grow and die without the world having resolved (or, even worse: considered resolved too glibly!).
- theophrastus 12y agoWhy 0.05? because 1 in 20~22: two standard deviations. so if your distribution isn't normal Gaussian you don't even have tradition on your side, (or perhaps 1 in 20 doesn't fit your risk model for say, testing pharmaceuticals?) http://www.jerrydallal.com/lhsp/p05.htm http://www.jerrydallal.com/lhsp/p05.htm "Still, why should the value 0.05 be adopted as the universally accepted value for statistical significance? ... It was Fisher who suggested giving 0.05 its special status... The value for which P=0.05, or 1 in 20, is 1.96 or nearly 2 ...Deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are thus formally regarded as significant. Using this criterion we should be led to follow up a false indication only once in 22 trials"
- tedunangst 12y agoIt's a good article, but I was really hoping they'd prove the earth round (or not). Sadly the only mention is the title.
- murbard2 12y agoThere's a very easy way to do null hypothesis testing. Take the sha256 sum of all your experimental data. If the first fives bits of the hash are 0, then you can reject the null hypothesis with p < 3%
- martinko 12y agoWhat is a sha256 SUM?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- murbard2 12y agoa cryptogtaphic digest, http://linux.die.net/man/1/sha256sum http://linux.die.net/man/1/sha256sum The message is a joke intended to make people think about limitations of null hypothesis techniques. On the one hand, the technique I describe is statistically rigorous, on the other hand, it is stupid because it has no power and is always random. However, in the Popperian framework of null hypothesis testing, there is no way to even express the fact that this test is worse than any other.