11–20 of 40 posts
Also there was previous HN post on p-values, which I found really interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330076
Also this Nautilus article: http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/sciences-significant-s...
I think statistics is one of the most misunderstood field of mathematics relative to how much the general person believes he or she knows about it. I know this article was about researchers and not the general public, but I can definitely sympathize with them; I have a MSc in engineering physics and I still have to think three times about a number before I know that all assumptions I have made while calculating it we…
Absolutely. If I were in charge of curriculum development for engineers, I'd swap out a couple of semesters of math that the student will never see again unless they end up working on EM simulators, and replace it with statistics course(s) that will be helpful throughout their careers. Unfortunately there's a lot of coursework in engineering that amounts to institutionalized hazing. The professor had to do it, so by…
54% of findings with p http://www.dcscience.net/Schuemie-Madigan-2012.pdf easy stats paper as to why: http://www.stats.org.uk/statistical-inference/Lenhard2006.pd...
https://xkcd.com/1478/, along with the awesome explain-xkcd: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1478:_P-Values
And my favorite:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. If I were in charge of curriculum development for engineers, I'd swap out a couple of semesters of math that the student will never see again unless they end up working on EM simulators, and replace it with statistics course(s) that will be helpful throughout their careers. Unfortunately there's a lot of coursework in engineering that amounts to institutionalized hazing. The professor had to do it, so by…
At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!), and at every meeting the academics all agree that they'd prefer that they were dropped. Unfortunately there's some kind of government requirement for practical work, so they stay.
they should replace it with trivial experiments of the 21st century - photon counting for Bell inequalities testing.
Wrt. the original article - good riddance, one less orthodoxy in science. Because it isn't about a tool - p-values in this case - itself, it is about orthodoxy which is the main enemy of science.
Here's the editorial by David Trafimow and Michael Marks explaining the new policy for their journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology": http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01973533.2015.101... And here's their concluding paragraph explaining their rationale and objective: We conclude with one last thought. Some might view the NHSTP[1] ban as indicating that it will be easier to publish in BASP, or that les…
And what should be used as an alternative? There is no reason to believe banning p value would result in improved research quality. Desperate researchers will just find another technique to game.
In the case of hard sciences and engineering, it's direct sensory data that feeds the argument and maintains the rigor. Every person's eyes more or less, function the same, lest we descend into philosophizing about language, continuity of meaning and perception.
Science will eventually have to come to terms with realizing that interpretation and truth is much more variant than the ideals of science reach for. A lot of social sciences have accepted this, and even teach this. But the expectation is people should then be more intelligent, hard working, and overall have greater competency than the norm demands. Unfortunately this is what creates part of the problem - the ability to bring a pattern into actual existence, by observing it before it actually exists.
I don't like the idea of survival of the fittest in research and ideas though. I think it starts with simple questions, like 'what are we looking to prove/demonstrate/etc?', 'why/how?', which is concurrently processed with stuff like ethical and moral introspection and discussion.
But the big point of science half the time is that no one knows what they are doing. The prestige and authority surrounding academia doesn't really place as much emphasis on this as it should.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. If I were in charge of curriculum development for engineers, I'd swap out a couple of semesters of math that the student will never see again unless they end up working on EM simulators, and replace it with statistics course(s) that will be helpful throughout their careers. Unfortunately there's a lot of coursework in engineering that amounts to institutionalized hazing. The professor had to do it, so by…
At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!), and at every meeting the academics all agree that they'd prefer that they were dropped. Unfortunately there's some kind of government requirement for practical work, so they stay.
Here's the editorial by David Trafimow and Michael Marks explaining the new policy for their journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology": http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01973533.2015.101... And here's their concluding paragraph explaining their rationale and objective: We conclude with one last thought. Some might view the NHSTP[1] ban as indicating that it will be easier to publish in BASP, or that les…
And what should be used as an alternative? There is no reason to believe banning p value would result in improved research quality. Desperate researchers will just find another technique to game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!), and at every meeting the academics all agree that they'd prefer that they were dropped. Unfortunately there's some kind of government requirement for practical work, so they stay.
Do they not take the chance to teach error propagation and some related statistics etc in this course? As well as the basics of scientific writing. And encourage students to invest in learning LaTeX already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they not take the chance to teach error propagation and some related statistics etc in this course? As well as the basics of scientific writing. And encourage students to invest in learning LaTeX already.
Oh, absolutely! However, you don't need 32 hours in a lab and 4000 words of formal reports and 100-odd pages of handwritten notes in order to prove that.