José Duarte, PhD

Tag: statistics

  • Minors, Lewandowsky, and Ceremonial Ethics

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    The Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer paper in PLOS ONE has been substantially corrected. I had alerted the journal last fall that there were serious errors in the paper, including the presence of a 32,757-year-old in the data, along with a 5-year-old and six other self-reported minors. The paleoparticipant in particular had knocked out the true…

  • The “Hottest year on record” fallacy

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    2014 was the hottest year on record by some hundredths of a degree. It was not significantly hotter than 2005 or 2010. See the Berkeley BEST lab for details. Global surface warming paused or slowed down after 1998 – there is some dispute about whether to call it a pause or a slowdown. We’ll treat…

  • Why eight fingers would (probably) increase Type-1 error

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    In a comment on my post on Significance, I discovered that our rate of published Type-1 error in science would probably be higher if humans had eight fingers instead of ten. Type-1 error is when we wrongly reject the null hypothesis – when our studies seem to give us evidence of an effect or link…

  • p-values banned

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    This is so refreshing. The Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology has banned p-values. And confidence intervals. Their reasons are extremely good reasons, and well-articulated. I forgot to stress this point explicitly in the recent essay on the Lewandowsky fraud, but descriptive statistics always trump inferential. A p-value has no inherent substantive meaning, nor…

  • Sweet things

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    Latent Class Modeling: I’m pretty sure this is the future. It’s a much more powerful, higher resolution method than linear correlation and its derivatives. The whole issue of frog jumping I talked about in an earlier post is eliminated by attending to different profiles of participants, which LCM does. Non-narcissistic self-esteem: It would be extremely…

  • Structure of Malpractice 1: The Frog Jump

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    Here is a tiny preview of upcoming methodological work relevant to recent events: The Frog Jump You have two survey variables: Variable 1: ABVariable 2: CD AB: A and B are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts for A; 2 pts for B)CD: C and D are opposites sharing a 4-point scale (2 pts…

  • Significance

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    I was struck by this quote from a Forbes piece on the secondhand smoke research. “there’s no such thing as borderline statistical significance. It’s either significant or it’s not.” It’s attributed to a journalist named Christopher Snowdon (I don’t know who that is.) It’s false, and I think it’s important for us to convey a…

  • How one paleo-participant can change the outcome of a study

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    Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) authored “The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science” in PLOS ONE. (Paper here.) This study has many of the same features as their Psychological Science scam. In that study, they falsely linked belief in the moon-landing hoax to climate skepticism when in fact only three participants…