Aella on Twitter: "But also it's extra terrible that this author reported a meaningful result when she admits it's not statistically significant! I'm physically recoiling from this idea. How are they training people in school that this is something they think is ok?" / Twitter

Women in science need to learn more about how statistics work. If I published results this low in significance as tho they were real I could have 'proved' eighty different insane things by now. To explain why this is bad:

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Emily Khazan

@EmilyKhazan

Nov 2, 2020

It can be hard being a #womaninscience, and teaching evaluations often don't help. We show gender bias in teaching reviews of graduate students; another subtle force making the leaky pipeline leakier: insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/0

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

Nov 3, 2020

Her sample size is low. There's calculations you can do to figure out exactly how meaningful a result (basically, what's the probability it was an "accidental" positive) is based on the sample size and the correlation strength. It's irresponsible to publish results as significant

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

Nov 3, 2020

if there's too high a probability that your correlation was just random chance. If you test a lot of things for long enough, you're absolutely gonna find lots of correlations that are just random chance! This means you have to be extra careful if you're checking a ton of these.

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Aella

@Aella_Girl

But also it's extra terrible that this author reported a meaningful result when she admits it's not statistically significant! I'm physically recoiling from this idea. How are they training people in school that this is something they think is ok?

5:10 PM · Nov 3, 2020

Replying to

I think to some degree they know it's not okay, but journalistic ethics are abandoned in favour of narrative at an increasingly common rate. It happens all the time, claims about sex/race inequality while only looking at one variable. Never asking why, etc.