This post summarizes the content of an article that is in press for PLOS ONE. The preprint is available on PsyArXiv. Efficient medical progress requires that we know when a treatment effect is absent. We considered all 207 Original Articles published in the 2015 volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and found that 45 (21.7%) reported a null…
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This post highlights a recent special issue on Bayesian inference edited by Joachim Vandekerckhove, Jeff Rouder, and John Kruschke for Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. What sets this special issue apart is that most of the 16 contributions (spanning a total of 285 pages!) have a tutorial character. Researchers and students who are new to Bayesian inference –its theoretical underpinnings, its…
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Much of my professional life is now spent proselytizing: using practical examples I highlight the virtues of Bayesian inference, and warn against the intellectual Dementors that beset those who base conclusions on a p-value (yes, even when p
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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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