
Gone fishing in a fluid trial - ehudla
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26947417
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dekhn
For those who don't get the joke, the term "fishing" in the paper's title
refers to "fishing for significance", a very common practice in academia.
Basically, you take a large data set and repeatedly ask different questions of
the data. If you ask enough different questions, without correcting for
multiple tests, it's possible, purely by chance, to find a P-value
(probability of rejecting the null hypothesis incorrectly) that appears
significant.

One imagines the authors tried each zodiacal sign until they found one that
passed the test. One imagines- but cannot say for sure- that a zodiacal sign
is not a feature which is truly correlated with the outcome they observed.

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hyperion2010
Oh man, I'm creating slides to teach intro stats to some fellow grad students,
this is quite timely. Not quite dead salmon level, but maybe more concerning
given the context. Check your assumptions!

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DiabloD3
This is a pretty neat paper. It really highlights how much bullshit flows
through the scientific paper industry.

"Publish or perish" is a bad metric, and it doesn't allow people to ask
themselves if their results actually make sense in any realistic sense, but
that they will be rewarded if they find some statistical correlation, no
matter how inappropriately stupid.

Those four guys must have giant balls for publishing this.

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ehudla
This is a precursor:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61047/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61047/)

