What's the Biggest Problem in Science?

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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