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Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

refsmmat.com

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Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#51

Post by neoterics »

mathattack wrote: post #24
Tycho wrote: post #17

If I was a billionaire, I would set up some sort of screening lab for scientific/academic/research papers. There would be a statistics division for evaluating the application of statistical methods being used; a replication division for checking that experiments do actually replicate; and a corruption division for investigating suspicious influences on the research. It would be tempting to then generate some sort of…

I think you'd get very depressed just by the statistics, let alone the reproduction. Especially if you included journals of econometrics.

You know what's more depressing when I read the Cochrane summaries about health studies...most of the medicines and treatments are no better than placebos!

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#52

Post by kisielk »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #41
mey wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any way to print the entire book as a document? Do you accept donations?

Not yet. I intend to get it published so you can buy a printed copy, but that hasn't happened. I don't accept donations, but sign up with your email and I'll let you know when you can pay me for a copy.

You might want to take a look at Leanpub (https://leanpub.com) if you haven't already. Seems like it may suit you.

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#53

Post by dragonwriter »

jessaustin wrote: post #46
neuralk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data science sure sounds sexier...ish. The irony of people who use the "damned lies and statistics" quote snidely is that the "statistics" part is not referring to the field Statistics but the plural version of the noun statistics, which of course are easily abused. The field of Statistics is all about NOT abusing statistics.

...ish. Yeah, it always makes me wonder when they have to put the "science" in the name. "Computation" seems so much more timeless and elegant than "computer science", for instance. It's almost like "Democratic Republic" for nations.

You know, lotsfields are named that way. Its just that the some of them are less obvious because both the part of the name identifying the domain and the part saying its the science (or "study", but with the same intended meaning) are in Latin, instead of plain English.

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#54

Post by jrochkind1 »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #16

Hey everyone, I'm the author of this guide. It's come full circle -- I posted it a week ago in a "what are you working on?" Ask HN post, someone posted it to Metafilter and reddit, and it made its way to Boing Boing and Daily Kos before coming back here. I'm currently working on expanding the guide to book length, and considering options for publication (self-publishing, commercial publishers, etc.). It seems like a…

awesome, thanks for writing this, and for whoever posted it here.

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#56

Post by jrochkind1 »

craigyk wrote: post #35
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #16

Hey everyone, I'm the author of this guide. It's come full circle -- I posted it a week ago in a "what are you working on?" Ask HN post, someone posted it to Metafilter and reddit, and it made its way to Boing Boing and Daily Kos before coming back here. I'm currently working on expanding the guide to book length, and considering options for publication (self-publishing, commercial publishers, etc.). It seems like a…

As a scientist I think you are addressing a very important problem with this book. I've taken two statistics classes, one graduate level, and even I am plagued with doubt as to wether the statistics I've used have all been applied and interpreted "correctly". That said, I think the recent spate of "a majority of science publications are wrong" stories is incredible hyperbole. Is it the raw data that is wrong (fabrica…

If, say, you find that your results are not statistically sigificant at a reasonable p-level, you don't get to claim your conclusion is right in 'broad strokes', maybe has some 'significant errors', a bit 'sloppy statistics', but it's broadly true, right?

Nope, instead it's not statistically significant, so there's no reason to think it wasn't just random chance that made it 'close' to statistically significant.

But if your results are statistically validated, but only because you used statistics incorrectly, you've crossed the line to broadly-true-but-with-sloppiness?

Nope.

There is room for qualitative research. I like qualitative research. But qualitative research has, righty, a different sort of impact.

If you are claiming your research is quantitative, then you need to live and die by good statistics. That's the implicit promise of providing the statistics in the first place, otherwise why do statistical calculations at all?

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#57

Post by capnrefsmmat »

kisielk wrote: post #52
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not yet. I intend to get it published so you can buy a printed copy, but that hasn't happened. I don't accept donations, but sign up with your email and I'll let you know when you can pay me for a copy.

You might want to take a look at Leanpub ( https://leanpub.com ) if you haven't already. Seems like it may suit you.

Unfortunately, Leanpub exclusively uses Markdown, which doesn't support things like using a BibTeX bibliography for references. I also don't think there's a way to customize the design of the print book, apart from cover images and such.

I'm writing using reStructuredText and Sphinx because they give me a bibliography, an index, full-text search, cross-referencing, custom environments (e.g. boxes for examples, tips, etc.), and all sorts of other cool features. For example, if I needed matplotlib plots, I can embed the code in my documents and Sphinx will generate them.

I'd immediately put the book on Leanpub if I could get some of these features. A Leanpub using a customized Sphinx would be incredibly useful for people writing textbooks.

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#58

Post by capnrefsmmat »

tokenadult wrote: post #36

I see the author of this interesting site is active in this thread. You may already know about this, but for onlookers I will mention that Uri Simonsohn and his colleagues http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/ have published a lot of interesting papers advising psychology researchers how to avoid statistical errors (and also how to detect statistical errors, up to and including fraud, by using statistical techniques on…

Thanks. I had seen some of his work, but browsing his list of publications I found a few more interesting papers. I've already worked one into my draft.

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#59

Post by chrislipa »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #22

Quite a few years ago i devised an ambitious method to achieve significance while sitting through another braindead thesis presentation (psychology): If you are interested in the difference of a metric scaled quantity between two groups do the following: 1.) Add 4-5 plausible control variables that you do not document in advance (questionaire, sex, age...). 2.) Write a r-script that helps you do the following: Whenev…

XKCD did it first:

http://xkcd.com/882/

Re: Statistics Done Wrong – The woefully complete guide

#60

Post by chris_va »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #16

Hey everyone, I'm the author of this guide. It's come full circle -- I posted it a week ago in a "what are you working on?" Ask HN post, someone posted it to Metafilter and reddit, and it made its way to Boing Boing and Daily Kos before coming back here. I'm currently working on expanding the guide to book length, and considering options for publication (self-publishing, commercial publishers, etc.). It seems like a…

Now if you could just send a copy of the book to every newspaper in the US...

I would donate to that goal.

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