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Sigh. P hacking has long been a meme. Nicholas Cage and shark attacks for example. P values are useful though if the results seem at least plausible or can be explained by some underlying process. Like a low p value between calorie restriction and weight loss.

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Shark attacks isn't really p-hacking though, that's about misinterpreting/misrepresenting a real correlation. P-hacking is finding a fake correlation due to chance because you tested a lot of different things in a smallish dataset, and then reporting that correlation as meaningful without mentioning your negative results or properly explaining your entire process.

This is what I don’t fully grasp about p hacking myself. Say you test variable abc and so on all the way to z. Variable z were found to be significant. Now imagine you had the same data set and just happened to test Z and stopped there, finding it significant.

According to the p hacking concept the former would be potentially unethical while the latter would be great science, however nothing about the underlying data or its association between variables has changed.

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