Cool Nerds

If you’re a Learning and the Brain devotee, you may have heard about p-values; you may even have heard about the “p-value crisis” in the social sciences — especially psychology.

This white paper by Fredrik deBoer explains the problem, offers some useful context, and gives you several strategies to see past the muddle.

Although deBoer’s considering very technical questions here, he writes with clarity and even a bit of humor. If you like digging into stats and research methodology, this short paper is well worth your time.

(As you may know, deBoer writes frequently — and controversially — about politics. I’m neither endorsing nor criticizing those views; I just think this paper makes an abstruse topic unusually clear.)