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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Psychologist Daniël Lakens disagrees with a proposal to redefine statistical significance to require a 0.005 p-value [soylentnews.org], and has crowdsourced an alternative set of recommendations with 87 co-authors [sciencemag.org]:

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 [psyarxiv.com]" 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 [twitter.com]," 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 [sciencemag.org]. 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 [nature.com] in September 2017. The content won't come as a big surprise—a preprint has been up on PsyArXiv [psyarxiv.com] 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."

Original Submission