gwern comments on Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013 - Less Wrong

1 Post author: witzvo 08 November 2013 08:13PM

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Comment author: gwern 13 November 2013 03:56:26PM *  4 points [-]

I don't know any easy solutions to the low replication rate of many areas right now. It seems to be fundamentally a systematic problem of incentives. Even the easiest and most basic remedies like clinical trial registries are not being enforced, so it's hopeless to expect reforms like making all studies well-powered. I do think that increasing alpha is unlikely to fix the problems and is likely to backfire by making things worse and rewarding cheaters & punishing honest researchers: the smaller the p-value required, the more you reward people who can run hundreds of analyses to get a p-value under the threshold and the more you punish honest researchers who did one analysis and stuck with it.