Sunday, February 26, 2017

"replication is central to science"


For a Sunday reflection, this from Andrew Gelman in "The Best Writing on Mathematics 2016":
"To resolve the replication crisis in science, we may need to consider each individual study in the context of an implicit meta-analysis. And we need to move away from a simplistic, deterministic model of science with its paradigm of testing and sharp decisions: accept/reject the null hypothesis and do/don't publish the paper. To say that a claim should be replicated is not to criticize the original study; rather, a replication is central to science, and statistical methods should recognize this. We should not get stuck in the mode in which a 'data set' is analyzed in isolation, without consideration of other studies or relevant scientific knowledge. We must embrace variation and accept uncertainty."


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