Hacker News Reader

Comment by TylerH | Hacker News Reader

Clickbait title; the whole thing only discusses psychology and no other field of study. Certainly not 'science' as a whole.

View on HN

Perhaps, but that sort of generic objection never makes for an interesting discussion.

We'll change the title from the doc heading ("It’s time for science to abandon the term ‘statistically significant’") to the page heading in the hope of stimulating something more specific.

Edit: turned out to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12685177.

No the title is accurate, the article is about use of statistics in scientific papers in general, with a focus on biomedicine - a huge field.

It talks about it, but it's based on a series of links to issues that were specific to psychology/psychiatry/brain-imaging. I'm not saying that the broader point isn't valid, but it's certainly not supported.

As I read it it refers to the biomedical field a lot...and the foundation of the article actually was built on Fisher's full explanation of statistical significance and backs it up with physicist Robert Matthew's insights...even so - you can't get away from the math - the math is sound.

> backs it up with physicist Robert Matthew's insights...even so - you can't get away from the math - the math is sound.

It's mind-blowing how bad the mathematical analysis is within the social sciences. As an undergraduate, the social science mathematics center chided me for using (standard) data-mining techniques as "fishing for results" despite having compensated for the number of parallel tests.

Later I learned that social science labs run pilot studies until they see a result and run a full study. Everyone is fishing for results, they are just claiming that each cast of their line is independent.

3-sigma should be the standard and no journal should accept a p-value greater than .01.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com