Cicero eloquently summarized the philosophical position that the universe is deterministic – all events are preordained, either by nature or by divinity. Although “ignorance of causes” may create the illusion of Fortune, in reality there is only Necessity. Cicero Citatus, Glans Inflatus? The male academic who cites Cicero generally lacks the insight that, instead of imbuing his writing with gravitas,…
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Summary: When Bayesians speak of probability, they mean plausibility. The famous Matrix trilogy is set in a dystopic future where most of mankind has been enslaved by a computer network, and the few rebels that remain find themselves on the brink of extinction. Just when the situation seems beyond salvation, a messiah –called Neo– is awakened and proceeds to free…
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In an earlier blog post we discussed a response (co-authored by 88 researchers) to the paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” (RSS; co-authored by 72 researchers). Recall that RSS argued that p-values near .05 should be interpreted with caution, and proposed that a threshold of .005 is more in line with the kind of evidence that warrants strong claims such as “reject…
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This is a guest post by Scott Glover. In a recent blog post, Eric-Jan and Quentin helped themselves to some more barbecued chicken. The paper in question reported a p-value of 0.028 as “clear evidence” for an effect of ego depletion on attention control. Using Bayesian analyses, Eric-Jan and Quentin showed how weak such evidence actually is. In none of…
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Today I am giving a lecture at the Replication and Reproducibility Event II: Moving Psychological Science Forward, organised by the British Psychological Society. The lecture is similar to the one I gave a few months ago at an ASA meeting in Bethesda, and it makes the case for radical transparency in statistical reporting. The talking points, in order: The researcher…
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For the past 18 months I have served on a committee that was tasked to write a report on how to improve the replicability of the empirical sciences. The report came out this Monday, and you can find it here. Apart from the advice to conduct more replication studies, the committee’s general recommendations are as follows (pp. 47-48 of the…
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The picture of the Texas sharpshooter is taken from an illustration by Dirk-Jan Hoek (CC-BY). The infamous Texas sharpshooter fires randomly at a barn door and then paints the targets around the bullet holes, creating the false impression of being an excellent marksman. The sharpshooter symbolizes the dangers of post-hoc theorizing, that is, of finding your hypothesis in the data.…
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The previous blog post discussed the preprint “Ego depletion reduces attentional control: Evidence from two high-powered preregistered experiments”. Recall the preprint abstract: “Two preregistered experiments with over 1000 participants in total found evidence of an ego depletion effect on attention control. Participants who exercised self-control on a writing task went on to make more errors…
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