James Coyne writes: A recent article co-authored by a leading mindfulness researcher claims to address the problems that plague meditation research, namely, underpowered studies; lack of or meaningful control groups; and an exclusive reliance on subjective self-report measures, rather than measures of the biological substrate that could establish possible mechanisms. The article claims adequate sample […]
Archive of posts filed under the Decision Theory category.
Here are some examples of real-world statistical analyses that don’t use p-values and significance testing.
Joe Nadeau writes: I’ve followed the issues about p-values, signif. testing et al. both on blogs and in the literature. I appreciate the points raised, and the pointers to alternative approaches. All very interesting, provocative. My question is whether you and your colleagues can point to real world examples of these alternative approaches. It’s somewhat […]
Conditional probability and police shootings
A political scientist writes: You might have already seen this, but in case not: PNAS published a paper [Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings, by David Johnson, Trevor Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario] recently finding no evidence of racial bias in police shootings: Jonathan Mummolo and Dean Knox noted […]
You are invited to join Replication Markets
Anna Dreber writes: Replication Markets (RM) invites you to help us predict outcomes of 3,000 social and behavioral science experiments over the next year. We actively seek scholars with different voices and perspectives to create a wise and diverse crowd, and hope you will join us. We invite you – your students, and any other […]
Swimming upstream? Monitoring escaped statistical inferences in wild populations.
Anders Lamberg writes: In my mails to you [a few years ago], I told you about the Norwegian practice of monitoring proportion of escaped farmed salmon in wild populations. This practice results in a yearly updated list of the situation in each Norwegian salmon river (we have a total of 450 salmon rivers, but not […]
Pre-results review: Some results
Aleks Bogdanoski writes: I’m writing from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) at UC Berkeley with news about pre-results review, a novel form of peer review where journals review (and accept) research papers based on their methods and theory — before any results are known. Pre-results review is motivated by growing […]
On deck through the end of 2019
Here’s what’s scheduled for the next six months: This is a great example for a statistics class, or a class on survey sampling, or a political science class How to read (in quantitative social science). And by implication, how to write. Causal inference with time-varying exposures Reproducibility problems in the natural sciences If you want […]
It’s a lot of pressure to write a book!
Regression and Other Stories is almost done, and I was spending a couple hours going through it starting from page 1, cleaning up imprecise phrasings and confusing points. . . . One thing that’s hard about writing a book is that there are so many places you can go wrong. A 500-page book contains something […]
How much is your vote worth?
Tyler Cowen writes: If it were legal, and you tried to sell your vote and your vote alone, you might not get much more than 0.3 cents. It depends where you live. If you’re not voting in any close elections, then the value of your vote is indeed close to zero. For example, I am […]
Tony nominations mean nothing
Someone writes: I searched up *Tony nominations mean nothing* and I found nothing. So I had to write this. There are currently 41 theaters that the Tony awards accept when nominating their choices. If we are being as generous as possible, we could say that every one of those theaters will be hosting a performance […]
Still at work on the piranha theorems
We’re still at work on the piranha theorems. But, in the meantime, I happened to show somebody this: There can be some large and predictable effects on behavior, but not a lot, because, if there were, then these different effects would interfere with each other, and as a result it would be hard to see […]
Why edit a journal? More generally, how to contribute to scientific discussion?
The other day I wrote: Journal editing is a volunteer job, and people sign up for it because they want to publish exciting new work, or maybe because they enjoy the power trip, or maybe out of a sense of duty—but, in any case, they typically aren’t in it for the controversy. Jon Baron, editor […]
Concurve plots consonance curves, p-value functions, and S-value functions
Andrew Vigotsky writes: Now that abandoning significance and embracing uncertainty is in the air, we think this package, which runs in R or Stata, may be of interest to both you and your readers. Concurve plots consonance curves, p-value functions, and S-value functions to allow readers and researchers to get a better feel of the […]
Let’s publish everything.
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins: How does the current replication crisis, along with other recent psychological trends, affect scientific creativity? To answer this question, we consider current debates regarding replication through the lenses of creativity research and theory. Both […]
Name this fallacy!
It’s the fallacy of thinking that, just cos you’re good at something, that everyone should be good at it, and if they’re not, they’re just being stubborn and doing it badly on purpose. I thought about this when reading this line from Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker: [Henry Louis] Gates is one of the […]
That illusion where you think the other side is united and your side is diverse
Lots of people have written about this illusion of perspective: The people close to you look to be filled with individuality and diversity, while the people way over there in the other corner of the room all look kind of alike. But widespread knowledge of this illusion does not stop people from succumbing from it. […]
Brakes
So. I noticed my rear brake wasn’t really doing anything. If I squeezed really hard, I could slow down, but not enough to stop going down a steep hill. No big deal—it’s the front brake that really matters, right?—but just for safety’s sake I went to the bike store one day and they replaced the […]
“Boosting intelligence analysts’ judgment accuracy: What works, what fails?”
Kevin Lewis points us to this research article by David Mandel, Christopher Karvetski, and Mandeep Dhami, which begins: A routine part of intelligence analysis is judging the probability of alternative hypotheses given available evidence. Intelligence organizations advise analysts to use intelligence-tradecraft methods such as Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) to improve judgment, but such methods […]
“How many years do we lose to the air we breathe?” Or not.
From this Washington Post article: But . . . wait a second. The University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute . . . what exactly is that? Let’s do a google, then we get to the relevant page. I’m concerned because this is the group that did this report, which featured this memorable graph: See this […]
Why “statistical significance” doesn’t work: An example.
Reading some of the back-and-forth in this thread, it struck me that some of the discussion was about data, some was about models, some was about underlying reality, but none of the discussion was driven by statements that this or that pattern in data was “statistically significant.” Here’s the problem with “statistical significance” as I […]