nshepperd comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1750)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: nshepperd 20 September 2013 02:43:22AM 3 points [-]

Take a hundred papers which claim results at p=0.05. At the asymptote about 95 of them will turn out to be correct and about 5 will turn out to be false.

No, they won't. You're committing base rate neglect. It's entirely possible for people to publish 2000 papers in a field where there's no hope of finding a true result, and get 100 false results with p<0.05 just by chance (along with 1900 other false results with p > 0.05).