Schlagwort: Statistik

Profit-values.

An awareness of the history of p-values might help deflate their swollen stature and encourage more judicious use. We were surprised to learn, in the course of writing this article, that the p < 0.05 cutoff was established as a competitive response to a disagreement over book royalties between two foundational statisticians. In the early 1920s, Kendall Pearson, whose income depended on the sale of extensive statistical tables, was unwilling to allow Ronald A. Fisher to use them in his new book. To work around this barrier, Fisher created a method of inference based on only two values: p-values of 0.05 and 0.01 (Hurlbert and Lombardi, 2009). Fisher himself later admitted that Pearson's more continuous method of inference was better than his binary approach: “no scientific worker has a fixed level of significance at which from year to year, and in all circumstances, he rejects [null] hypotheses; he rather gives his mind to each particular case in the light of his evidence and ideas” (Hurlbert and Lombardi, 2009: 316). A fair interpretation of this history is that we use p-values at least in part because a statistician from the 1920s was afraid that sharing his work would undermine his income (Hurlbert and Lombardi, 2009). Following Fischer, we recommend that authors report p-values and refrain from emphasizing thresholds. This will allow us to more easily interpret evidence on a continuum and in the context of previous findings.

Goldfarb & King (2015): Scientific apophenia in strategic management research: Significance tests & mistaken inference https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2459

Writemail.

It seems this year I sent six e-mails on an average day.

Oversampling.

Buses and trains are supposed to arrive at constant intervals, but in practice some intervals are longer than others. With your luck, you might think you are more likely to arrive during a long interval. It turns out you are right: a random arrival is more likely to fall in a long interval because, well, it’s longer.

Probably Overthinking It (Allen Downey): The Inspection Paradox is Everywhere

Kip kip kip kip kip kip kip kip kip kip kip kip.

Reality check: as of 2019 the average person in the Netherlands eats one entire chicken per month.

Carbon Surprises.

In a sense, the few Bitcoin transactions I have done last year may have ended up corresponding to several hundred kilos of CO2e on their own. I would never have guessed.

a3nm: Estimating carbon footprints: what is 1 ton of CO2e?