Vladimir_Nesov comments on Professional Patients: Fraud that ruins studies - Less Wrong

16 Post author: jimrandomh 05 January 2012 12:20AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 January 2012 03:42:08PM *  3 points [-]

Aha! No wonder so much antidepressant research is crap.

This, perhaps facetiously, suggests way more explanatory power than the potential problem in question deserves.

Comment author: gwern 05 January 2012 06:31:14PM *  1 point [-]

Indeed. I'd heard about this before, so this is not news.

Since many studies end with small effect sizes, but we count significance rather than size, their effect is magnified further.

This is what I want to hear more about. Given 5% dupes, how much significance and effect-size does this leech away? My intuition says this could explain a non-zero number of failed drugs, but not the entire dismal litany, but intuition is far inferior to some worked-out numbers.