Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Really Nature, really?

This is going to be a quick one cause i need to catch a bus in 10 minutes.
A nice paper came out in PNAS on how messed up the p-value cutoff of 5% is. Nature (the journal, not the other nature) decided to report on it here:
http://www.nature.com/news/weak-statistical-standards-implicated-in-scientific-irreproducibility-1.14131?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews
Somewhere in the middle of that you will find this little gem:
"he found that a P value of 0.05 or less — commonly considered evidence in support of a hypothesis in fields such as social science, in which non-reproducibility has become a serious issue — corresponds to Bayes factors of between 3 and 5, which are considered weak evidence to support a finding."
Now, does that sounds weird to anyone?
Nature, that's a dick move! Pretending this is mainly a problem in "social science" is silly. The amount of money bio-medical research wastes because of building on shitty statistics is staggering (obviously, i don't know the number). And you (again, nature) as a publisher of some of that drivel should be highlighting that, not pretending it's not a problem.

Shame!

1 comment:

critichu said...

plus, p-value <0.05 is not "evidence on support of a hypothesis", it's exactly the other way around: it's used to reject a hypothesis