Dance p 3 Mar09
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a vivid visual demonstration of how unreliable p-values are.
What it is
Geoff Cumming uses a simulation to show how wildly the p value varies from one replication to the next because of sampling variability. He argues for estimation and confidence intervals over null hypothesis significance testing.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2011 to 2015.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec knowledgesale · 2011-12 · on “Ask HN: What interesting non-intuitive things do you know?”
The p-value [1] criterion is often used to test a proposed hypothesis in medical and social science research papers. When you stumble upon something along the lines of "studies that shown that eating broccoli makes people happy" in your everyday life, it comes down to the p-value calculation being small enough <0.05 for the before and after gathered datasets. The p-value method is practically a standard for scientific reporting in some fields. It also has some drastic shortcomings, including, e,g., dramatic instability for tests with only little data [2]. Naturally, people realize that and try to use additional tools and criteria when available. However, scientists are pretty brutally incent
Strong rec po · 2015-02 · on “Psychology Journal Bans Significance Testing”
The audio is a bit quiet but the 'dance of the p values' video [1] linked to by the article is absolutely fantastic and well worth watching. [1] [this video]
Cites lomnakkus · 2014-03 · on “Gravity waves from Big Bang detected”
I can't claim to understand much of the statistics, but according to [1], p-values are pretty sketchy as a measure of "is this likely to be true?" [1] [this video]