Manfred comments on Link: "When Science Goes Psychic" - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Tesseract 08 January 2011 09:00AM

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Comment author: Manfred 08 January 2011 12:54:27PM 11 points [-]

One lesson of the common misuse of statistics is to not "defy the data" until you're sure what it says.

Here's an important reply cited in the other threads:
http://www.ruudwetzels.com//articles/Wagenmakersetal_subm.pdf

Does psi exist? In a recent article, Dr. Bem conducted nine studies with over a thousand participants in an attempt to demonstrate that future events retroactively affect people’s responses. Here we discuss several limitations of Bem’s experiments on psi; in particular, we show that the data analysis was partly exploratory, and that one-sided p-values may overstate the statistical evidence against the null hypothesis. We reanalyze Bem’s data using a default Bayesian t-test and show that the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent.

Comment author: gwern 09 January 2011 07:51:56PM 1 point [-]

I read the NYT link yesterday or something, and IIRC, they mention somewhere that the statisticians had already found major flaws - like that. I'm a little surprised anyone feels a need to 'defy the data'.