Science Memes

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submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] marcos 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

We don't. We keep just doing things and good things keep happening afterwards.

We don't even know if those two facts are linked in any way.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Nearly irrelevant xkcd

At least in software we know where the linchpins are on some level.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Descartes said it best. The only thing I can know for sure is that I do, in fact, exist.

[–] taiyang 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Frequentist statistics are really... silly in a way. And this coming from someone who has to teach it. Sure, p is less than 5%, but you sampled 100,000 people-- an effect size of 0.05 would be significant at this rate. "bUt ItS sIgNiFiCaNt"... Oy.

[–] Contramuffin 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I get very suspicious if a paper samples multiple groups and still uses p. You would use q in that case, and the fact that they didn't suggests that nothing came up positive.

Still, in my opinion it's generally OK if they only use the screen as a starting point and do follow-up experiments afterwards

[–] taiyang 5 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, I used to work in a field with huge samples so significance wasn't really all that useful. I usually just report significant coefficients and try to make clear what changes by model. For instance, if a type of curriculum showed improvements on test scores, you simply say how much and, possibly, illustrate it by saying if a person went from 50th percentile to 55th percentile.

Every field varies, though. I find it crazy how much psychologists I've worked with cared about r-squared. To each their own, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

The fun part is that we don't