Yes, these were not (entirely) real–my five April pranks

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My “April 1” posts for the past 5 years have been so close to the truth or possible truth that they weren’t always spotted as April Fool’s pranks, which is what made them genuine April Fool’s pranks. (After a few days I labeled them as such, or revealed it in a comment). So since it’s Saturday night on the last night of April, I’m reblogging my 5 posts from first days of April. (Which fooled you the most?)

• 4/1/12 Philosophy of Statistics: Retraction Watch, Vol. 1, No. 1 

This morning I received a paper I have been asked to review (anonymously as is typical). It is to head up a forthcoming issue of a new journal called Philosophy of Statistics: Retraction Watch.  This is the first I’ve heard of the journal, and I plan to recommend they publish the piece, conditional on revisions. I thought I would post the abstract here. It’s that interesting.

“Some Slightly More Realistic Self-Criticism in Recent Work in Philosophy of Statistics,” Philosophy of Statistics: Retraction Watch, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2012), pp. 1-19.In this paper we delineate some serious blunders that we and others have made in published work on frequentist statistical methods. First, although we have claimed repeatedly that a core thesis of the frequentist testing approach is that a hypothesis may be rejected with increasing confidence as the power of the test increases, we now see that this is completely backwards, and we regret that we have never addressed, or even fully read, the corrections found in Deborah Mayo’s work since at least 1983, and likely even before that.

You can read the rest here.

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• 4/1/13 Flawed Science and Stapel: Priming for a Backlash? 

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Deiderik Stapel is back in the news, given the availability of the English translation of the Tilberg (Levelt and Noort Committees) Report as well as his book, Ontsporing (Dutch for “Off the Rails”), where he tries to explain his fraud. An earlier post on him is here. While the disgraced social psychologist was shown to have fabricated the data for something like 50 papers, it seems that some people think he deserves a second chance. A childhood friend, Simon Kuper, in an article “The Sin of Bad Science,” describes a phone conversation with Stapel:…..

You can read the rest here.

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• 4/1/14 Skeptical and enthusiastic Bayesian priors for beliefs about insane asylum renovations at Dept of Homeland Security: I’m skeptical and unenthusiastic 

Danver State Hospital

I had heard of medical designs that employ individuals who supply Bayesian subjective priors that are deemed either “enthusiastic” or “skeptical” as regards the probable value of medical treatments.[i] …But I’d never heard of these Bayesian designs in relation to decisions about building security or renovations! Listen to this….

You may have heard that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose 240,000 employees are scattered among 50 office locations around D.C.,has been planning to have headquarters built at an abandoned insane asylum St Elizabeths in DC [ii]. (Here’s a 2015 update.)

You can read the rest here.

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• 4/01/15 Are scientists really ready for ‘retraction offsets’ to advance ‘aggregate reproducibility’? (let alone ‘precautionary withdrawals’) 

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Given recent evidence of the irreproducibility of a surprising number of published scientific findings, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) sought ideas for “leveraging its role as a significant funder of scientific research to most effectively address the problem”, and announced funding for projects to “reset the self-corrective process of scientific inquiry”. (first noted in this post.)

You can read the rest here.

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• 4/1/16 Er, about those “other statistical approaches”: Hold off until a balanced critique is in?

I could have told them that the degree of accordance enabling the “6 principles” on p-values was unlikely to be replicated when it came to most of the “other approaches” with which some would supplement or replace significance tests– notably Bayesian updating, Bayes factors, or likelihood ratios (confidence intervals are dual to hypotheses tests). [My commentary is here.] So now they may be advising a “hold off” or “go slow” approach until some consilience is achieved. Is that it? I don’t know. I was tweeted an article about the background chatter taking place behind the scenes; I wasn’t one of people interviewed for this. Here are some excerpts, I may add more later after it has had time to sink in. (check back later)

You can read the rest here.