Comments on Livia Blackburne: The Winning Neuropublishing Jokes and a Statistics...

Ha - love the jokes. Good stuff. I hopped over f...

2010-03-26T13:32:50.503-04:00

Ha - love the jokes. Good stuff. I hopped over from writtenwyrdd's blog.

I understand your words... The concept, however......

2010-03-26T11:32:13.922-04:00

I understand your words... The concept, however...

Nevertheless, those are all funny jokes, because even if I don't "get" the statistics bit, I get that scientists must fiddle with data.

I found your blog via a reference from The Intern. I'll be back. :)

Okay, since I am not a brain scientist, but a writ...

2010-02-23T18:53:57.772-05:00

Okay, since I am not a brain scientist, but a writer/reader, I will leave my comment to the reading part. Otherwise, I may sound like a fool. :)

I loved The Graveyard Book!!

I don't miss stats (particularly since, when I...

2010-02-23T16:47:31.180-05:00

I don't miss stats (particularly since, when I was at uni, we ran a lot of it on old Apple IIs).

Did you ever hear the Monty Hall problem (aka the probability thingy with the goats I'd much rather win)? Joe and I used to argue over it a lot, until he changed the prize distribution (once goats became the big prize, I was totally on board...)

I remembered most of that from statistics! That...

2010-02-22T15:50:59.297-05:00

I remembered most of that from statistics! That's fantastic, I feel smart :o)

Oh, and thank you for liking my joke.

I feel compelled to write my own short explanation...

2010-02-22T14:07:33.293-05:00

I feel compelled to write my own short explanation of multiple comparisons for a lay audience, because I think I'm going to need it again some day...

Imagine you have a quarter and you want to know if it always comes up heads. You flip it 5 times, and it comes up heads every time.

Because you're an expert in stats, you know that that will only happen 1 out of every 32 times with a normal quarter. In other words, the probability of getting that result with a *normal* quarter is around 3%. In other words, as Livia pointed out very well, we're going to say that we think this is a trick quarter, but we acknowledge there's a 3% chance that we just got a strange set of coin flips.

In scientific terms, the "null hypothesis" is that the quarter is normal. We tentatively "reject the null hypothesis", because there's only a 3% chance of a trick quarter. This is a key point about science -- EVERYTHING is tentative. We're never, ever sure about anything. We can never directly prove our hypotheses are correct, we can *only* disprove other hypotheses. And we always doing this while acknowledging there's a certain chance that we're wrong. Hopefully, that chance is vanishingly small, but not always...

Now, on with the story. Say you go to the bank teller and tell them to open up the vault, because you heard a rumor they might have some counterfeit coins in there. You insist that they flip each of their 20,000 coins five times each, and if any of them come up with heads all five times, you're going to call the cops.

See the problem with this? While there's only a 1/32 chance that any one quarter will come up all-heads, when you do this 20,000 times, you expect several hundred quarters to have all-head results, through pure chance alone.

You need to be much more careful with your threshold for a counterfeit coin because you're testing so many, and so you "correct for multiple comparisons". The simplest way of doing this is just to change your mind about when you're *sure* a coin is counterfeit. If you're satisfied suspecting a single fake coin after 5 throws, you'd require, say, 18 throws to satisfy yourself that the bank really had a bad quarter.

Livia's explanation was great, but if you didn't get it the first time around, maybe that helped?

I loved it, can't wait to tell it at my next c...

2010-02-22T10:37:44.382-05:00

I loved it, can't wait to tell it at my next cocktail party - now what was the punch line again?

I'm sorry I missed the competition! And I had such great jokes...but then after I corrected for multiple comparisons...

Very fun Livia

I actually did understand that...and I'm not s...

2010-02-21T21:44:48.447-05:00

I actually did understand that...and I'm not sure if that should scare me or not.

I love how your scientific brain works. My husband...

2010-02-21T20:43:52.053-05:00

I love how your scientific brain works. My husband is a technical genius and I don't understand a lot his jokes, but I think it's cute that he thinks their funny. I did like your first joke though. Thanks for your comment on POV. Also thank you for becoming a follower. I already like your blog a lot.

Got it. Of course I do. No problem at all :)

2010-02-21T18:54:48.485-05:00

Got it. Of course I do. No problem at all :)

Wow. That statistics lesson was very nearly as hot...

2010-02-21T18:07:03.486-05:00

Wow. That statistics lesson was very nearly as hot as your neuroscientists' love-at-first-sight scene! Whoo! *fans self*

;)

Congrats to the winners :D

2010-02-21T18:01:15.965-05:00

Congrats to the winners :D