Redefine Statistical Significance Part XVI: The Commentary by JP de Ruiter

Across virtually all of the empirical disciplines, the single most dominant procedure for drawing conclusions from data is “compare-your-p-value-to-.05-and-declare-victory-if-it-is-lower”. Remarkably, this common strategy appears to create about as much enthusiasm as forcefully stepping in a fresh pile of dog poo. For instance, In a recent critique of the “compare-your-p-value-to-.05-and-declare-victory-if-it-is-lower” procedure, 72 researchers argued that p-just-below-.05 results are evidentially weak, and…

read more

Replaying the Tape of Life

In his highly influential book ‘Wonderful Life’, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed that evolution is an unpredictable process that can be characterized as “a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable. Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let…

read more

A Bayesian Decalogue: Introduction

With apologies to Bertrand Russell. John Tukey famously stated that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel, and I. J. Good argued that there are at least 46,656 qualitatively different interpretations of Bayesian inference (Good, 1971). With so much Bayesian quarrelling, outsiders may falsely conclude that the field is in disarray. In order to provide a…

read more

A 171-Year-Old Suggestion to Promote Open Science

Tl;dr In 1847, Augustus De Morgan suggested that researchers could avoid overselling their work if, every time they made a key claim, they reminded the reader (and themselves) of how confident they were in making that claim. In 1971, Eric Minturn went further and proposed that such confidence could be expressed as a wager, with beneficial side-effects: “Replication would be…

read more