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bcdarwin

156 karma · joined December 29, 2020

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bcdarwin··on Hungry men exposed to blue light are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field (2019)
Exactly - a p-hack is a form of misreporting, so isn't easy to detect at the level of individual studies.

However, p-hacking isn't the only threat to replicability: in this case the authors have reported a large set of tests, so we can ask why they didn't control family-wise error via Bonferroni or friends (in which case the reported statistical significance almost certainly disappears). Also, I suspect if you fit Bayesian models (either separately or a hierarchical model) using reasonably narrow priors based on what we know about human sensitivity to magnetic fields, how much other senses are affected by sex differences, hunger, etc., and not starting each test assuming a complete state of ignorance of the world, then the data would be compatible with no effect.

bcdarwin··on Hungry men exposed to blue light are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field (2019)
I am not claiming that the possibility is excluded, just that it is not demonstrated here.

> In mammals, this is what guides birds to migrate. It's far more than that and the earth undergoes these field changes every interval with profound impact on life on earth.

> You and I are all made out of Earth and the things we eat and breathe are all Earth itself. There's just no way that we can brush off this phenomena with pedantry.

I agree that biology is profound, but pseudoscientific generalities like this confuse rather than clarify. [Likely typo: birds are not mammals.]

bcdarwin··on Hungry men exposed to blue light are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field (2019)
I'm not saying it isn't true, just that it's not statistically supported by the evidence presented in the paper.

You can invent post hoc justifications for almost any positive conclusion (although this one is weak since the authors admit the effect cannot be detected in individuals, only in aggregate).

[edit: you can even p-hack and retroactively justify your way to entire subfields; see famously https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev...]

bcdarwin··on Hungry men exposed to blue light are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field (2019)
Brief comments suggesting this result is p-hacking are being downvoted, but I highly doubt this result will replicate. There's just so many chances (men/women/everyone, light, hunger) to reject the null hypothesis, no attempt as far as I can see to correct for this (e.g., Bonferroni), no priors/regularization, etc.
bcdarwin··on Lambda.r Functional Programming in R
For a more conservative FP-inspired R library there's `lenses` (disclaimer: I am a coauthor), which is available on CRAN, accessible to users familiar with R indexing syntax, tidyverse-compatible, and has gentle introductory documentation: https://github.com/cfhammill/lenses