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Threadreader version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304399437641461760.html

He mentions changing the threshold for significance as a possible tweak but the issue is something more fundamental. Humans have flaws - like political biases or a tendency to favor one’s own hypotheses (confirmation bias). Humans also operate within systems that have incentives that can motivate them away from truth seeking (publication bias). All this exacerbated the fundamental problem that statistical techniques are easy to manipulate. Virtually all academic (university) studies, in their published format, simply lack the necessary information, controls, and processes a reader would need to easily detect flawed statistical claims. Instead a reader has to blindly trust - assuming that data was not selectively included/excluded or that the parameters of the experiment were rigorously (neutrally) chosen or whatever else. There is no incentive for the academic world to correct for this - there isn’t for example, a financial consequence for a decision based on bad statistics, as a private company might face.




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