PhilGoetz comments on Too good to be true - Less Wrong

24 Post author: PhilGoetz 11 July 2014 08:16PM

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Tags: publication literature 95%

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Comment author: benkuhn 12 July 2014 01:14:35AM *  7 points [-]

In your "critiquing bias" section you allege that 3/43 studies supporting a link is "still surprisingly low". This is wrong; it is actually surprisingly high. If B ~ Binom(43, 0.05), then P(B > 2) ~= 0.36.*

*As calculated by the following Python code:

from scipy.stats import binom
b = binom(43, 0.05)
p_less_than_3 = sum(b.pmf(i) for i in [0,1,2])
print 1 - p_less_than_3
Comment author: PhilGoetz 12 July 2014 01:33:44AM 1 point [-]

I said "surprisingly low" because of publication & error bias.

Comment author: private_messaging 21 July 2014 10:21:01PM *  2 points [-]

Which way do you think publication bias on the issue goes, anyway?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 20 September 2016 03:01:10PM 0 points [-]

I wrote a paragraph on that in the post. I predicted a publication bias in favor of positive results, assuming the community is not biased on the particular issue of vaccines & autism. This prediction is probably wrong, but that hypothesis (lack of bias) is what I was testing.

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