Hacker News Reader

Quote from the paper: "Fanelli found that the number of papers providing support for the main hypothesis had increased from 70% in 1990 to 86% in 2007 (it is unclear why Fanelli reported an over 22% increase in the abstract)."

of course, my calculator yields 86/70=1.228 (which would be a >22% increase)

such basic flaws really dont bode well for the rest of the paper.

View on HN

I think it's generally frowned upon to do percentages of percentages.

For example: An increase from 70 bananas to 86 bananas is an increase of 16 bananas, or 22 per cent.

But an increase from 70 per cent to 86 per cent is an increase of 16 per cent.

It's especially relevant that the 70% and 86% here are percentages of different totals.

A "22% increase" sounds like the underlying number of positive results increased by 22%, which it didn't. It increased by more than 22% because the total number of publications is increasing too.

An "increase of 16 percentage points" would have been much more standard.

I think that this is not correct: both are an increase of 22 percent, but the latter is also an increase of 16 percentage points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage_point).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com