E. J. Wagenmakers writes: You may be interested in a recent article [by Nieuwenhuis, Forstmann, and Wagenmakers] showing how often researchers draw conclusions by comparing p-values. As you and Hal Stern have pointed out, this is potentially misleading because the … Continue reading
In econometrics, or applied economics, a “placebo test” is not a comparison of a drug to a sugar pill. Rather, it’s a sort of conceptual placebo, in which you repeat your analysis using a different dataset, or a different part … Continue reading
In a news article entitled “Why smart kids shouldn’t use laptops in class,” Jeff Guo writes: For the past 15 years, educators have debated, exhaustively, the perils of laptops in the lecture hall. . . . Now there is an … Continue reading
Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone (link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. Firestone writes:
Following up on the remark here, Ben Jann writes, This just sprang to my mind: Do you remember the 2005 paper on oxytocin and trust by Kosfeld et al. in Nature? It has been in the news. I think they … Continue reading
Ben Jann writes, I came across your paper on the difference between significant and non-significant results. My experience is that this misinterpretation is made in about every second talk I hear and also appears in a lot of published work. … Continue reading
One of my favorite points arose in the seminar today. A regression was fit to data from the 2000 Census and the 1990 Census, a question involving literacy of people born in the 1958-1963 period. The result was statistically significant … Continue reading
Hal Stern updated our paper, ‘The difference between “significant” and “not significant” is not itself statistically significant,’ to include this example of sexual preference and birth order. Here’s the abstract of our paper: It is common to summarize statistical comparisons … Continue reading
This paper, “Biological versus nonbiological older brothers and men’s sexual orientation,” by Anthony Bogaert, appeared recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was picked up by several news organizations, including Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News, … Continue reading
I blogged on this awhile ago and then recently Hal Stern and I wrote a little more on the topic. Here’s the paper, and here’s the abstract: A common error in statistical analyses is to summarize comparisons by declarations of … Continue reading
The difference between “statistically significant” and “not statistically significant” is not in itself necessarily statistically significant. By this, I mean more than the obvious point about arbitrary divisions, that there is essentially no difference between something significant at the 0.049 … Continue reading
In his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the political journalist George Orwell drew a connection between cloudy writing and cloudy content. The basic idea was: if you don’t know what you’re saying, or if you’re trying to say … Continue reading
This comes up from time to time, for example someone sent me an email expressing a concern that preregistration stifles innovation: if Fleming had preregistered his study, he never would’ve noticed the penicillin mold, etc. My response is that preregistration … Continue reading
This is a long post, so let me give you the tl;dr right away: Don’t use the word “whom” in your dating profile. OK, now for the story. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night. It … Continue reading
A couple of faithful correspondents pointed me to this recent article, “Fertility Fails to Predict Voter Preference for the 2020 Election: A Pre-Registered Replication of Navarrete et al. (2010).” It’s similar to other studies of ovulation and voting that we’ve … Continue reading
Paul Campos points us to this discussion of the record of the Detroit professional basketball team: The Detroit Pistons broke the NBA record for most consecutive losses in a season last night, with their 27th loss in a row. . … Continue reading
Ben Recht writes: I’m a fan of physician-blogger John Mandrola. He had a nice response to your blog, using it as a jumping-off point for a short tutorial on his rather conservative approach to medical evidence assessment. John is always … Continue reading
This came up in our piranha paper, and it’s convenient to have these references in one place: Here are just some of the factors that have been published in the social priming and related literatures as having large and predictable … Continue reading
The prior Paul Campos posted something on the ages of the expected major-party candidates for next year’s presidential election: Joe Biden is old. Donald Trump is also old. A legitimate concern about old people in important positions is that they … Continue reading
Multiple available measures indicate worsening mental health among US teenagers. Prominent researchers, commentators, and news sources have attributed this to effects of information and communication technologies (while not always being consistent on exactly which technologies or uses thereof). For example, … Continue reading