Summary Einstein confused his students with a riddle about probability – or was it Einstein himself who was confused? Albert Einstein disliked the idea that the laws of nature were inherently probabilistic. ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ he stated famously and repeatedly. Yet, physicists like Niels Bohr strongly advocated the idea –based on the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of…
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The promised post on Einstein will follow next week. More and more psychologists are registering their hypotheses, predictions, and analysis plans prior to data collection. Will such preregistration be the death knell for creativity and serendipity? Gilles Dutilh, Alexandra Sarafoglou, and I recently wrote an article for Perspectives on Psychological Science that provides a historical perspective on this question. In…
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Cicero eloquently summarized the philosophical position that the universe is deterministic – all events are preordained, either by nature or by divinity. Although “ignorance of causes” may create the illusion of Fortune, in reality there is only Necessity. Cicero Citatus, Glans Inflatus? The male academic who cites Cicero generally lacks the insight that, instead of imbuing his writing with gravitas,…
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Summary: When Bayesians speak of probability, they mean plausibility. The famous Matrix trilogy is set in a dystopic future where most of mankind has been enslaved by a computer network, and the few rebels that remain find themselves on the brink of extinction. Just when the situation seems beyond salvation, a messiah –called Neo– is awakened and proceeds to free…
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In an earlier blog post we discussed a response (co-authored by 88 researchers) to the paper “Redefine Statistical Significance” (RSS; co-authored by 72 researchers). Recall that RSS argued that p-values near .05 should be interpreted with caution, and proposed that a threshold of .005 is more in line with the kind of evidence that warrants strong claims such as “reject…
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This is a guest post by Scott Glover. In a recent blog post, Eric-Jan and Quentin helped themselves to some more barbecued chicken. The paper in question reported a p-value of 0.028 as “clear evidence” for an effect of ego depletion on attention control. Using Bayesian analyses, Eric-Jan and Quentin showed how weak such evidence actually is. In none of…
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Today I am giving a lecture at the Replication and Reproducibility Event II: Moving Psychological Science Forward, organised by the British Psychological Society. The lecture is similar to the one I gave a few months ago at an ASA meeting in Bethesda, and it makes the case for radical transparency in statistical reporting. The talking points, in order: The researcher…
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For the past 18 months I have served on a committee that was tasked to write a report on how to improve the replicability of the empirical sciences. The report came out this Monday, and you can find it here. Apart from the advice to conduct more replication studies, the committee’s general recommendations are as follows (pp. 47-48 of the…
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