Lars P. Syll

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We recommend dropping the NHST [null hypothesis significance testing] paradigm — and the p-value thresholds associated with it — as the default statistical paradigm for research, publication, and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences. Specifically, rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p < 0.05 (or some other statistical threshold) to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more broadly...

Handy missing data methodologies On October 13, 2012, Manny Fernandez reported in The New York Times that former El Paso schools superintendent Lorenzo Garcia was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating​ a testing scandal. The Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) is a state-mandated test for high-school sophomores. The TAKS missing data algorithm was to treat missing data as missing-at-random, and hence the score for the entire school...

Parachutes do not reduce death when jumping from aircraft Parachute use compared with a backpack control did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when used by participants jumping from aircraft in this first randomized evaluation of the intervention. This largely resulted from our ability to only recruit participants jumping from stationary aircraft on the ground. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community,...

What counts as evidence? What counts as evidence? I suspect we tend to overweight some kinds of evidence, and underweight others. Yeh’s paper is a lovely illustration of a general problem with randomized control trials – that they tell us how a treatment worked under particular circumstances, but are silent about its effects in other circumstances. They can lack external validity. Yeh shows that parachutes are useless for someone jumping from a plane when...

What is missing in Keynes’ General Theory The cyclical succession of system states is not always clearly presented in The General Theory. In fact there are two distinct views of the business cycle, one a moderate cycle which can perhaps be identified with a dampened accelerator-multiplier cycle and the second a vigorous ‘boom and bust’ cycle … The business cycle in chapter 18 does not exhibit booms or crises … In chapter 12 and 22, in the rebuttal to Viner,...

När svenska medier vill veta något om ekonomi frågar de Arturo Arques.Han är privatekonom på en storbank och när tidningen Flamman i förra veckan (4 jan) granskade vilka ekonomer som citeras i 100 artiklar i svensk press är han kårens mest pratsamma stjärna … Sex av tio intervjuade ekonomer kommer från näringslivet, framför allt från arbetsgivarorganisationer, banker och försäkringsbolag. Det är tiofalt fler än från facken och deras närstående organisationer, till exempel...

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Why I am not a Bayesian No matter how atheoretical their inclination, scientists are interested in relations between properties of phenomena, not in lists of readings from dials of instruments that detect those properties … Here as elsewhere, Bayesian philosophy of science obscures a difference between scientists’ problems of hypothesis choice and the problems of prediction that are the standard illustrations and applications of probability theory. In the...