More About Academics and Dodgy Statistics
The Wall Street Journal:
Can statisticians “prove almost anything”? Canada’s National Post takes on one of the academic issues of the moment.
The focus is a new article in Psychological Science, alluded to on Ideas Market last week, called “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” In it, three psychologists make their case by presenting a study in which people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m 64″ literally grew younger, relative to a control group. They cheated in order to get that manifestly false result, but they cheated in ways that, they argue, are allowed under current standards for data collection and presentation.
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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