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Are you being p-hacked? Time to hack back.

by Jacob Falkovich
20th Dec 2016
1 min read
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This is a linkpost for http://putanumonit.com/2016/12/18/multiplicitous
Personal Blog

10

Are you being p-hacked? Time to hack back.
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[-]cousin_it9y20

Thank you for writing that! To sum up:

Alice: I got this result with p<0.05

Bob: How many hypotheses did you test?

Alice: 10

Bob: Then you got the result with p<0.5

This is going straight into my toolbox.

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[-]Lumifer9y20

maybe WE SHOULD STOP USING FUCKING P-VALUES FOR HYPOTHESIS TESTING.

There's some... tension between this correct statement and the rest of your blog post :-/

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[-]Jacob Falkovich9y20

You're right, I added a paragraph explaining why I do this:

P-values aren’t very useful in getting close to the truth, but they’re everywhere, they’re easy to work with and they’re moderately useful for getting away from bullshit. Since the latter is our goal in this essay we’ll stick with looking at p-values for now.

Since you see p-values reported all the time and they're easy to calculate (because they're uniformly distributed), there's value in extracting whatever useful evidence there is in p-values.

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[-]gjm9y20

Unfortunately for the author's "Rule of two Ns", "Bonferonni" is actually spelt "Bonferroni".

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[-]Jacob Falkovich9y00

I feel like such a dumbass.

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[-]MrMind9y20

You could correct the post as "Both 'Dunn' and 'Bonferroni' have exactly two 'n' in them. Thus we have etc."

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[-]Jacob Falkovich9y60

That's a good suggestion, but I actually had to update that entire section because the math had an embarrassing mistake and I renamed the rule.

By the way, I have a policy on my blog of paying bounties to commenters who catch major errors. I sent $5 to the commenter who pointed out where I messed up the math. If you see a really stupid mistake on Putanumonit, leave a comment there and make a buck.

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[-]gjm9y00

Sorry!

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