R help - Mar 2010 - OT Sorta: Odds Are, It's Wrong...

Hi all,

I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at ScienceNews
of interest:

  Odds Are, It's Wrong
  Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
  By Tom Siegfried
  March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26)
  http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong


Regards,

Marc Schwartz

On 15-Mar-10 16:22:13, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> Hi all,
> I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at
> ScienceNews of interest:
> 
>   Odds Are, It's Wrong
>   Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
>   By Tom Siegfried
>   March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26)
>  
> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wro
> ng
> 
> Regards,
> Marc Schwartz
If you changed your Subject to "Odds R, it's wrong", arc, you
might get
more on-topic, Marc. Or at least increase people's subjective beliefs
that it was OT.

That's not a bad article, as such things go!

I was reminded of reading, many moons ago in a book[1] by John Ziman[2],
words to the effect that[3]:

  "If your experiment gives a result significant at the 5 per cent
   level, then 1 in 20 of your colleagues is entitled to disblieve
   you."

[1]
Ziman, John (1968).
Public Knowledge: Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science.
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-06894-0.

[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ziman

[3]
I don't have the book immediately to hand (though I have it somewhere),
so cannot vouch that the above is verbatim. However, it's not far off,
and the final clause very probably is verbatim.

Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
Date: 15-Mar-10                                       Time: 17:21:02
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

On 03/16/2010 03:22 AM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at
ScienceNews of interest:
>
>    Odds Are, It's Wrong
>    Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
>    By Tom Siegfried
>    March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26)
>   
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong
>
>
The real problem with statistics may not be that it is so hard to learn, 
but that it is so easy to forget.

Jim

Marc Schwartz-3 wrote:
> 
> I thought that readers of R-Help might find the following article at
> ScienceNews of interest:
> 
>   Odds Are, It's Wrong
>   Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics
>   By Tom Siegfried
>   March 27th, 2010; Vol.177 #7 (p. 26)
>  
> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/57091/title/Odds_are,_its_wrong
> 
> 
Too bad the article is so long that all my p-value-greedy colleagues from
the medical faculty won't read it. 

Journals should apply a post-hoc Bonferroni-correction by the number of
p-values cited in an article.

Dieter

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