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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: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @09:08PM (6 children)
Stats are super delicate beast. But if you had the quantitative mind to work proper stats, you wouldn't be doing psychs/social science in the first place, would you.
(Score: 4, Touché) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 29 2018, @12:05AM (5 children)
Without a doubt psych and social will one day be quantitative
Consider the origin of chemistry
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @12:23AM (4 children)
Origin of chemistry is cooking. What's your point?
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 29 2018, @01:21AM (2 children)
Tkdfrbjf gb
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @06:52AM (1 child)
People here at SN indulge you because of your mental illness, but that schtick is done. Get back on med or GTFO.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @07:27PM
Actually "Tkdfrbjf gb" is about all one can say to an idiot with little knowledge of history but an insufferable ego that thinks it has all the answers. I found it to be quite appropriate, insightful even.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:17AM
The origin of chemistry is alchemy.
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