I wonder if we should separate the roles of scientist and researcher. Universities would have generalist "scientists" who's job would be to consult for domain-specialized researchers to ensure they're doing the science and statistics correctly. That way, we don't need every researcher in every field to have a deep understanding of statistics, which they often don't. Either that or stop rewarding such bad behavior. Sc…
Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
11–20 of 168 posts
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#12Speaking not to this study in particular necessarily, I strongly agree with the general point. Science has really been held back by an over-focusing on "significance". But I'm not really interested in a pile of hundreds of thousands of studies that establish a tiny effect with suspiciously-just-barely-significant results. I'm interested in studies that reveal robust results that are reliable enough to be built on to…
> Plus, the idea that we can remove such small, noisy confounding factors is just silly. We need to look for the things that stand out from that noise floor We have found most of them, and all the easy ones. Today the interesting things are near the noise floor. 3000 years ago atoms were well below the noise floor, now we know a lot about them - most of it seems useless in daily life yet a large part of the things we…
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#13Speaking not to this study in particular necessarily, I strongly agree with the general point. Science has really been held back by an over-focusing on "significance". But I'm not really interested in a pile of hundreds of thousands of studies that establish a tiny effect with suspiciously-just-barely-significant results. I'm interested in studies that reveal robust results that are reliable enough to be built on to…
> Plus, the idea that we can remove such small, noisy confounding factors is just silly. We need to look for the things that stand out from that noise floor We have found most of them, and all the easy ones. Today the interesting things are near the noise floor. 3000 years ago atoms were well below the noise floor, now we know a lot about them - most of it seems useless in daily life yet a large part of the things we…
Bear in mind that my criteria are two-dimensional, and I'll accept either. By all means, go back and establish your 3% effect to a p-value of 0.0001. Or 0.000000001. That makes that 3% much more interesting and useful.
It'll especially be interesting and valuable when you fail to do so.
But we do not, generally, do that. We just keep piling up small effects with small p-values and thinking we're getting somewhere.
Further, if there is a branch of some "science" that we've exhaused so thoroughly that we can't find anything that isn't a 3%/p=0.047 effect anymore... pack it in, we're done here. Move on.
However, part of the reason I so blithely say that is that I suspect if we did in fact raise the standards as I propose here, it would realign incentives such that more sciences would start finding more useful results. I suspect, for instance, that a great deal of the soft sciences probably could find some much more significant results if they studied larger groups of people. Or spent more time creating theories that aren't about whether priming people with some sensitive word makes them 3% more racist for the next twelve minutes, or some other thing that even if true really isn't that interesting or useful as a building block for future work.
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#14Speaking not to this study in particular necessarily, I strongly agree with the general point. Science has really been held back by an over-focusing on "significance". But I'm not really interested in a pile of hundreds of thousands of studies that establish a tiny effect with suspiciously-just-barely-significant results. I'm interested in studies that reveal robust results that are reliable enough to be built on to…
Not only is it not valuable to publish tons of studies with p=.04999 and small effect size, in fact it's harmful. With so many questionable results published in supposedly reputable places it becomes possible to "prove" all sorts of crackpot theories by selectively citing real research. And if you try to dispute the studies you can get accused of being anti-science.
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#15I wonder if we should separate the roles of scientist and researcher. Universities would have generalist "scientists" who's job would be to consult for domain-specialized researchers to ensure they're doing the science and statistics correctly. That way, we don't need every researcher in every field to have a deep understanding of statistics, which they often don't. Either that or stop rewarding such bad behavior. Sc…
This is sounding like a great startup idea for a new scientific journal, actually.
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#16Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#17Speaking not to this study in particular necessarily, I strongly agree with the general point. Science has really been held back by an over-focusing on "significance". But I'm not really interested in a pile of hundreds of thousands of studies that establish a tiny effect with suspiciously-just-barely-significant results. I'm interested in studies that reveal robust results that are reliable enough to be built on to…
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#18Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#19That's because mask acts on R0, not seroprevalence. After acting on R0, if R0 is >1, exponential growth, if 1 to <1.
Re: Effect size is significantly more important than statistical significance
#20But this doesn't necessarily follow, does it? If there really were a 1.1-fold reduction in risk due to mask-wearing it could still be beneficial to encourage it. The salient issue (taking up most of the piece) seems to be not the size of the effect but rather the statistical methodology the authors employed to measure that size. The p-value isn't meaningful in the face of an incorrect model -- why isn't the answer a better model rather than just giving up?
Small effects are everywhere. Sure, it's harder to disentangle them, but they're still often worth knowing.