15 Comments
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MJ's avatar

The retracted 2020 study that taught me about P-hacking: Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose

https://pubpeer.com/publications/341C41AED4E29DBD67D9D3EFE36F66

The post-publication commentary online caught that they were originally looking at whether being hungry or sated affected honesty, and when that didn't pan out, they tried to invent a different "study" around the data collected. It was retracted fairly quickly after that was pointed out.

Ragen Chastain's avatar

Yikes! how have I never heard about this? Thanks for posting it.

Wren's avatar

This is hugely helpful for someone (like me) who felt overwhelmed by my statistics class in college and grad school. You lay it out beautifully. I would love to see more pieces like this!

Sophie Binney's avatar

Ragen, you and other readers may be interested in this editorial, as well as the full issue of the journal American Statistical Association that it is based on.

Moving to a World Beyond p < 0.05 by Wasserstein, Schirm, and Lazar.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2019.1583913

Ragen Chastain's avatar

This is super interesting, thank you!

Robynne's avatar

I find this super interesting! Thank you!

Renelle LeBlanc-Scott's avatar

Very well explained article!! Thanks so much for sharing this information!!! šŸ™‚

Sarah's avatar

Just came here to say I want more like this! So cool.

Kate Schultz's avatar

Agreed! I'd love to understand more about all of those numbers and protocols in scientific papers. I haven't found a resource that can explain statistics in research papers for someone who doesn't know much about statistics.

Abigail Ladd's avatar

LOVE THIS! Thank you for all your work!

Heather J's avatar

GenAI is likely to make it a lot easier for those staring down the barrel of "publish or perish" to game the system. Not only does GenAI make P-hacking easier, but it also makes it more feasible for scientists and other researchers to publish in areas outside their actualy expertise. Many publishers and research funders are requiring disclosure for use of GenAI. That could be another "red flag" to keep an eye out for going forward.

Stef's avatar

Randall Monroe has a good treatment of this on xkcd 882

https://xkcd.com/882/

Becky Karush's avatar

I really like reading your writing on these topics.

Terry's avatar

This is exactly the kind of stuff needed right now. I talk with people all the time who say ā€œa study provedā€ whatever nonsense they are promoting but when you look at the ā€œstudyā€ it’s just an opinion they found some actual facts out of context that back up their opinion. Or they confused causation with correlation. My favorite was a ā€œstudyā€ that showed that people who drink diet soda are more likely to be heavy, which proves that diet soda makes people heavy. When really what it was saying was that heavy people are more likely to drink diet soda (because marketing has convinced them they need to).

Recognizing bias and being able to discern what is true science and what is marketing couched in scientific words is not only important in health but in all phases of life. Please, please do more of this!!!

jamie fritz's avatar

Oooh this makes my head hurt.