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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the finding-significance dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 29 2018, @07:09AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 29 2018, @07:09AM (#629733) Journal

    Sounds like someone couldn't find a relationship..
    So someone couldn't find a statistically significant relationship between something that they really wanted to, and they try to re-define what statistically significant is instead of just accepting what they found. That's how I read that load of crap, anyway.

    Ah, it started so promising.
    Like a new hypothesis on the (inverse) correlation between the chance of the author to get a date IRL and the "number of useless scientific papers" or "time spent in science activism".
    What a letdown.

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