Veritasium
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2017–2025
12:22 · 6.2M views · Aug 11, 2016
Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.
HN commenters link it whenever a shaky study or the p<0.05 threshold comes up, as a short primer on false positives in science.
19 comments from Hacker News
Cue “p = 0.05 is a random choice” and a big thread about p-hacking. Any takers? It feels like everything to say has already been said about the bias of small sample sizes and the dangers of p-hacking. But it also seems like the discussion is inevitable here. I wonder if there’s a new insight to glean, somehow... For a background on why p-values are misleading, see this video which is excellent. He points out that 0.05 was selected by Ronald Fischer in 1925, and people have gone with it since.
If the test data does not have a 50/50 split (or something around that ratio), the headline is straight up lies. Skewed test data is the most common problem with research, reminds me of this great video by Veritasium (Is most published research wrong?): this video
Wikipedia is infamously bad at teaching math. This Veritasium video does a great job at explaining how such skewed priors can easily appear in our current academic system and the paradox in general: this video
Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results: this video
My dude. Please go get yourself some education on how science works. I feel embarrassed for you. The reproducibility crisis is about the prevalence of false positive results in the scientific literature. This video is a good primer: this video A false positive is when a paper says "this works" when it actually doesn't, because of a statistical fluke in their sample. Even if citing the reproducibility crisis as an excuse to believe something that science has repeatedly found to be false isn't a really bad reason for belief (which it definitely is)... it doesn't even apply because there can't be false positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming because there aren't any positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming. Even the paper put out by neurolinguistic programming practicioners themselves wasn't able to produce a detectable effect over a placebo. I'm sorry, my friend, but this is an intervention. You're in a cult. You're making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and fortune tellers.