Psychologist Daniël Lakens disagrees with a proposal to redefine statistical significance to require a 0.005 p-value, and has crowdsourced an alternative set of recommendations with 87 co-authors:
Psychologist Daniël Lakens of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands is known for speaking his mind, and after he read an article titled "Redefine Statistical Significance" on 22 July 2017, Lakens didn't pull any punches: "Very disappointed such a large group of smart people would give such horribly bad advice," he tweeted.
In the paper, posted on the preprint server PsyArXiv, 70 prominent scientists argued in favor of lowering a widely used threshold for statistical significance in experimental studies: The so-called p-value should be below 0.005 instead of the accepted 0.05, as a way to reduce the rate of false positive findings and improve the reproducibility of science. Lakens, 37, thought it was a disastrous idea. A lower α, or significance level, would require much bigger sample sizes, making many studies impossible. Besides. he says, "Why prescribe a single p-value, when science is so diverse?"
Lakens and others will soon publish their own paper to propose an alternative; it was accepted on Monday by Nature Human Behaviour, which published the original paper proposing a lower threshold in September 2017. The content won't come as a big surprise—a preprint has been up on PsyArXiv for 4 months—but the paper is unique for the way it came about: from 100 scientists around the world, from big names to Ph.D. students, and even a few nonacademics writing and editing in a Google document for 2 months.
Lakens says he wanted to make the initiative as democratic as possible: "I just allowed anyone who wanted to join and did not approach any famous scientists."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday January 29 2018, @09:00AM (2 children)
Exactly: statistics is a tool. p 0.05 is just fine for most things, as long as you defined your hypothesis ahead of time. The problem comes with things like p-hacking, where people runs all sorts of random correlations, find one that just happens to be p 0.05, and claim that as a useful result. Setting the standard threshold to p 0.005 won't change abuses like that - it just makes them a bit more difficult. However, for legitimate researchers who know what they're doing, it will make life unnecessary more difficult.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @09:42AM (1 child)
There aren't many good researchers in the social sciences, anyway. You can tell because the good ones will have little else to say than, "More research is needed." The social sciences try to measure things that are entirely subjective and largely unprovable (like how "happy" someone is), and therefore can almost never be truly conclusive. But even the honest researchers will have their studies misrepresented by the media to serve some ridiculous agenda, so we're doomed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheRaven on Monday January 29 2018, @11:47AM
sudo mod me up