Posted on 11/22/2011 6:05:34 AM PST by reaganaut1
Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics.
But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth.
Not so, says a new report in the journal Psychological Science, which claims to show “how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.”
In “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” two scientists from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a colleague from Berkeley, argue that modern academic psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers that they can literally prove anything.
In effect turning the weapons of statistical analysis against their own side, the trio managed to to prove something demonstrably false, and thereby cast a wide shadow of doubt on any researcher who claims his findings are “statistically significant.”
In “many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not,” they write.
Defined as “the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis,” a false positive is “perhaps the most costly error” a scientist can make, they write, in part because they are “particularly persistent” in the literature.”
False positives also waste resources, and “inspire investment in fruitless research programs and can lead to ineffective policy changes.” Finally, they argue, a field known for publishing false positives risks losing its credibility.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalpost.com ...
Like how is it statistically possible that the antithesis for social conservatism is “leading” in the polls? (Newt)
This is news? The Global Warming crowd have been running this con for years.
This explains the current raving lunacy of Paul Krugman.
This isn’t news.
None of this should be news.
When I first got out of college I worked with a man who was close to retirement age. When people would selectively manipulate data he would say “no matter how much you polish it a road apple is still a road apple.”
I wonder what percentage of the time they can prove what they want to prove...
This explains why the global warming hoax was so effective in the beginning
Well duh, 3 out of 4 people already knew this to be true.
It took a statistician to figure this crap out?
OR
Numbers don’t lie but statisticians do.
You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter!
“This explains why the global warming hoax was so effective in the beginning”
There were so many math errors in the global warming mumbo-jumbo that for a moment I thought that the analysis was being done by the senate finance committee.
—Well duh, 3 out of 4 people already knew this to be true.—
I did hear, a number of years ago, that six out of four co-eds had been date raped.
And if you add up the numbers, I believe 120% of the country’s population is saved at revival meetings every year.
I read an article claiming that the unemployment rate at the OWS meetings was lower than at the TEA party meetings.
They didn’t mention that a lot of people at the TEA party meetings where retired, and the OWS folks were often just plain lying, or their “job” was washing dishes or flipping burgers.
As I like to interpret our Dear Leader and his sycophants:
Figures don’t lie but liars figure.
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