I Will Send You Kittens in a Box

In this episode, Dan and James are joined by Andy Field (University of Sussex), author of the “Discovering Statistics” textbook series, to chat about statistical literacy.

Highlights:

• The story behind Andy’s new book
• SPSS and Bayesian statistics
• Andy explains why he thinks the biggest problem in science is statistical illiteracy
• Researcher degrees of freedom and p-hacking
• The story behind the the first version of ‘Discovering statistics’
• How to improve your statistical literacy
• Does peer review improve the statistics of papers
• Researchers will draw different conclusions on the same dataset
• The American Statistical Association’s statement on p-values
• How has the teaching of statistics for psychology degrees changed over the years
• Andy fact checks his own Wikipedia page
• Andy’s thoughts on Bayesian statistics and how he applied it in a recent paper
• The peer review of new statistical methods
• Andy’s future textbook plans
• The rudeness of mailing lists/discussion forums
• What is something academia or stats-related that Andy believes that others think is crazy?
• The one book that Andy recommends that everyone should read
• We learn the crossover in James and Andy’s taste in metal bands

Links

Andy’s books: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/author/andy-field-0
The ‘PENIS of statistics’ lecture from Andy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe3_DeLC2JE
Daniel Lakens’ Coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-inferences
The American Statistical Association’s statement on p-values: http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
The refereeing decision paper: https://osf.io/gvm2z/
R stan: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rstan/index.html
Statistical rethinking book: https://www.crcpress.com/Statistical-Rethinking-A-Bayesian-Course-with-Examples-in-R-and-Stan/McElreath/p/book/9781482253443

Music credits: Lee Rosevere freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/

Special Guest: Andy Field.

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