Sorry, Gwern, I may be slandering you, but I thought I noticed it long before that (I've been reading, despite my silence). Another thing I have accused you of, in my head, is a failure to appropriately apply a multiple test correction when doing some data exploration for trends in the less wrong survey. Again, I may have you misidentified. Such behavior is striking, if true, since it seems to me one of the most basic complaints Less Wrong has about science (somewhat incorrectly).

Edited: Gwern is right (on my misremembering). Either I was skimming and didn't notice Gwern was quoting or I just mixed corrector with corrected. Sorry about that. In possible recompense: What I would recommend you do for data exploration is decide ahead of time if you have some particularly interesting hypothesis or not. If not and you're just going to check lots of stuff, then commit to that and the appropriate multiple test correction at the end. That level of correction then also saves your 'noticing' something interesting and checking it specifically being circular (because you were already checking 'everything' and correcting appropriately).

This is going to be yet another horrible post. I just go meta and personal. Sorry.

I don't understand how this thread (and a few others like it) on stats can happen; in particular, your second point (re: the basic mistake). It is the single solitary thing any person who knows any stats at all knows. Am I wrong? Maybe 'knows' meaning 'understands'. I seem to recall the same error made by Gwern (and pointed out). I mean the system works in the sense that these comments get upvoted, but it is like. . . people having strong technical opinions with very high confidence about Shakespeare without being able to write out a sentence. It is not inconceivable the opinions are good (stroke, language, etc), but it says something very odd about the community that it happens regularly and is not extremely noticed. My impression is that Less Wrong is insane on statistics, particularly, and some areas of physics (and social aspects of science and philosophy).

I didn't read the original post, paper, or anything other than some comment by Goetz which seemed to show he didn't know what a p-value was and had a gigantic mouth. It's possible I've missed something basic. Normally, before concluding a madness in the world, I'd be careful. For me to be right here means madness is very very likely (e.g., if I correctly guess it's -70 outside without checking any data, I know something unusual about where I live).

Not just going meta for the sake of it: I assert you have not sufficiently thought throught the implications of promoting that sort of non-openness publicly on the board. Perhaps you could PM jsavaltier.

I'm lying, of course. But interesting to register points of strongest divergence between LW and conventional morality (JenniferRM's post, I mean; jsalvatier's is fine and interesting).

"Indeed, I cannot think of any high school scholarship that is used primarily to collect information for the sponsoring organization (is this really the case?). However, there is good reason for this – no one else is interested in reaching the same group of high school students. SI is the only organization I know of who wants to reach high school students for their research group."

I find this place persistently surprising, which is nice. Try to imagine what you would think if a religious organization did this and how you would feel. It's alright to hold a scholarship to encourage kids to be interested in a topic; not so to garner information for your own purposes, unless that is incredibly clear upfront. Very Gwernian.