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army1987 comments on Using degrees of freedom to change the past for fun and profit - LessWrong

41 Post author: CarlShulman 07 March 2012 02:51AM

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Tags: science statistics bias

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Comment author: army1987 03 March 2012 03:45:54PM 12 points [-]

Using the same method as in Study 1, we asked 20 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates to listen to either “When I’m Sixty-Four” by The Beatles or “Kalimba.” Then, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they indicated their birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) and their father’s age. We used father’s age to control for variation in baseline age across participants. An ANCOVA revealed the predicted effect: According to their birth dates, people were nearly a year-and-a-half younger after listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” (adjusted M = 20.1 years) rather than to “Kalimba” (adjusted M = 21.5 years), F(1, 17) = 4.92, p = .040

This is by far the most awesome thing I've read in a while.

Comment author: djcb 08 March 2012 11:22:12AM *  0 points [-]

I'm sorry if I state the obvious, but you do realise that the paper is about the fact that this result does not hold, and is a result of the misuse of statistics?

Comment author: othermaciej 11 March 2012 02:32:34AM 1 point [-]

I think the poster you replied to meant "awesome" in the sense of "hilarious".

Comment author: army1987 11 March 2012 01:13:45AM *  0 points [-]

<sarcasm>No, I thought listening to songs could actually change your chronological age.</sarcasm> (Or is that comment supposed to be some kind of joke, but is too subtle for me to get it?)

Comment author: djcb 11 March 2012 10:52:07AM 0 points [-]

Actually, I didn't get your 'awesome'. Internet-irony etc. In outside-LW world, I bet there would be plenty of people who'd actually believe the claim, so I thought some of that may have gone into this. Should have checked your other posts.

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