B
Benjamin Weiner
Guest
Robert Chung <[email protected]> wrote:
> Then the recipe is a framework and a guideline within which you balance and adjust things to get
> the best result. If you know what you're doing you get better results if you taste and adjust and
> improvise. If you don't know what you're doing the dinner can end up a disaster and you'd have
> been better off following the recipe. Having an exact cut-off is like following the recipe
> exactly: it tends to protect your research findings from ending up as indigestible garbage. If you
> know what you're doing then the p-level is just another parameter you consider when you're trying
> to produce the best research.
Some scientists, no matter what they cook, it winds up tasting like fudge ...
As you suggest elsewhere, the difference between a marginally significant result with no mechanism
and the same set of data with a well justified mechanism is major, but not easy to express in
terms of p-values. That's subjective. So's science. The Bayesians have a word for this (I think
it's "Doh!")
> Then the recipe is a framework and a guideline within which you balance and adjust things to get
> the best result. If you know what you're doing you get better results if you taste and adjust and
> improvise. If you don't know what you're doing the dinner can end up a disaster and you'd have
> been better off following the recipe. Having an exact cut-off is like following the recipe
> exactly: it tends to protect your research findings from ending up as indigestible garbage. If you
> know what you're doing then the p-level is just another parameter you consider when you're trying
> to produce the best research.
Some scientists, no matter what they cook, it winds up tasting like fudge ...
As you suggest elsewhere, the difference between a marginally significant result with no mechanism
and the same set of data with a well justified mechanism is major, but not easy to express in
terms of p-values. That's subjective. So's science. The Bayesians have a word for this (I think
it's "Doh!")