Thursday, May 02, 2013
Justin Wolfers
?An academic telling non-academics not to accept the authoritarian pronouncements of academics.
If the author can’t explain what they’re doing in terms you can understand, then you shouldn’t be convinced. You wouldn’t be convinced by an analysis just because it was written in ancient Latin, so why be impressed by an abundance of Greek letters? Sophisticated statistical methods can be helpful, but they can also hide more than they reveal.
And MGL and Phil will like this:
With huge data sets, almost everything is statistically significant.
Great way to frame it. I always say that our job is not to find an effect, since involving humans guarantees that you will find something non-random. Our job is to find the MAGNITUDE of the effect, the degree to which it exists. But, I like the way they say it better:
Evidence should always shift your thinking on an issue; the question is how far.
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