So Much For ‘statistical Objectivity’

Hugh Johnson

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Last year, we recruited 29 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question with the same data set. Teams approached the data with a wide array of analytical techniques, and obtained highly varied results …

All teams were given the same large data set collected by a sports-statistics firm across four major football leagues. It included referee calls, counts of how often referees encountered each player, and player demographics including team position, height and weight. It also included a rating of players’ skin colour …

unchallengable-statistics.png
Of the 29 teams, 20 found a statistically significant correlation between skin colour and red cards … Findings varied enormously, from a slight (and non-significant) tendency for referees to give more red cards to light-skinned players to a strong trend of giving more red cards to dark-skinned players …

Had any one of these 29 analyses come out as a single peer-reviewed publication, the conclusion could have ranged from no race bias in referee decisions to a huge bias.

https://www.nature.com/news/crowdsourced-research-many-hands-make-tight-work-1.18508

So how can we trust any research? I lack the resources to do my own studies.
 

rei

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So how can we trust any research? I lack the resources to do my own studies.

If you cannot do the research yourself you need to listen to someone that can and you trust. Assume all published research is fabrication and deception, and try to filter out the truth.
 
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You need a hybrid approach where you mix info and feelings. You double check scientific articles (of course you must only use the most straightforward experiments as possible) with your personal experience and vice versa. Your personal feelings are of course a very weak instrument in the conventional sense (this is why Redditards like to shout n=1 when they run out of good arguments) but you have access to a sort of “meta-statistics” because you are, in the case of your body, both the scientist and the object of study, simultaneously. This is a powerful technique but there’s no real guarantee that the results will work well for anyone apart from yourself.
 
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Hugh Johnson

Hugh Johnson

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Joined
Mar 14, 2014
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The Sultanate of Portugal
You need a hybrid approach where you mix info and feelings. You double check scientific articles (of course you must only use the most straightforward experiments as possible) with your personal experience and vice versa. Your personal feelings are of course a very weak instrument in the conventional sense (this is why Redditards like to shout n=1 when they run out of good arguments) but you have access to a sort of “meta-statistics” because you are, in the case of your body, both the scientist and the object of study, simultaneously. This is a powerful technique but there’s no real guarantee that the results will work well for anyone apart from yourself.
Pretty much what I've been doing. But stress hormones tend to feel good temporarily, and I would like to gain knowledge about things I can't test. About the nature of reality and conciosuness etc.
 

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