Quentin André
@quentinandre
Assistant Prof. of Marketing @ CU Boulder. Open science, research methods, managerial and numerical cognition. ❤️Python 🐍.
I'm sorry but this is so funny and sad at the same time. A pure distillation of r/thathappened, made a memoir.
This is not any study. This is the study that, according to @olgakhazan.bsky.social's reporting, launched the field in the direction of "alcohol consumption in male can lead to adverse effects". And its conclusions are derived from completely erroneous statistical analyses! 10/N
Again, you don't need to be a statistical genius to figure out that a degree of separation like this can only emerge from a procedure that AIMS at maximizing separation. Completely circular reasoning. 8/N
Any statistican who has seen this before (insanely small p-values with small N) knows the most likely culprit: "Pseudoreplication", when non-independent observations are analyzed as if they were independent. Claude Opus 4.8 provides an exellent summary of the issue. 5/N
Yet the effects on morphological differences are HUGE. I'm talking p = 2.1 × 10⁻⁵⁴. This alone should raise a giant red flag: How can the downstream effects of alcohol availability be several dozens of magnitudes larger than the upstream effects? 4/N
Let's start with the effect size. This figures shows the "manipulation check": The dose of ethanol consumed by the sire. As you can see, the direction is as expected, but the intermediary contrasts (low vs. medium, medium vs. high) barely cross the .05 threshold.
This hasn't received much attention, but it looks like scammers also hacked into Francesca Gino's MTurk account, and asked MTurkers to buy her book Rebel Talent to boost the first-week sales of the book. Poor lady cannot catch a break. (links in comments)
When it's Halloween, but your 2.5yo daughter insists that "we should bring the skeleton inside" and "make it cozy with a blankie and a pillow".
Oh my god thank you! I needed it the other day and could not find it, so I recreated a worse one in PowerPoint...
If, as a reviewer, you see an unusual statistical test being reported in a manuscript, it never hurts to double-check whether the test does what the authors claim. Who knows, it might help a journal not publish inaccurate results.
More from HBS' Amended Complaint. They claim to have evidence that Gino backdated a fabricated file to exonerate herself.
Do you remember Francesca Gino's claim on her website that HBS analyzed the "wrong data file" in their investigation, and that a "real file" proved her innocence? HBS is now claiming that the "real file" was fabricated by Gino... and thus that Gino's claim was defamatory.
Data Colada has submitted a motion for sanction against Francesca Gino and her former lawyer team. I hope the court rules in their favor. It will be a powerful message that sleuths can expose fake research without fearing legal consequences. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Bill Ackman has a humiliation kink. There's no other explanation that makes sense.
In the midst of all this shittiness, I'm grateful for the desert and for birds.
Update on this: The Supplementary Materials report an attrition analysis showing that excluded and non-excluded participants do not significantly differ in some aspects. This contradicts my hunch that "the most depressed participants" were excluded... So all good then?
At first glance, the paper looks pretty rigorous: Pre-registrations! Open data and materials! FDR-corrected p-values! Independent replications! So where's the problem? I suspect the answer lies in the sentence highlighted below:
A similar idea was expressed by Trump earlier this week, when he came out against machinery on docks. However, this thinking neglects the second-order effects of labor replacement. It is undeniable that automation destroyed many factory and farm jobs... 2/3
Finally in print! We discuss the value of group sequential designs: They make hypothesis testing more informative and more cost-effective; and we offer simple guidelines on how to adopt them. Nick and I have been doing brown bags/webinars on it: Let us know if you are interested or have questions!