How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers

by Tim Harford

My own instinct is that statistical significance is an unhelpful concept and we could do better, but others are more cautious. John Ioannidis – he of the ‘Most Published Research Findings Are False’ paper – argues that despite the flaws of the method, it’s ‘a convenient obstacle to unfounded claims’. Unfortunately, there is no single clever statistical technique that would make all these problems evaporate. The journey towards more rigorous science requires many steps, and we at least are taking some of them. I recently had the chance to interview Richard Thaler, a Nobel Memorial Prize winner in economics, who has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman and many other psychologists. He struck me as well placed to evaluate psychology as a sympathetic outsider. ‘I think the replication crisis has been great for psychology,’ he told me. ‘There’s just better hygiene.’36 Brian Nosek, meanwhile, told the BBC: ‘I think if we do another large reproducibility project five years from now, we are going to see a dramatic improvement in reproducibility in the field.’