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piskovtoday at 7:11 AM1 replyview on HN

It is mumbo jumbo (also people hearing “significant” treat this as “effect/change is large and important” which is in no relation to the actual amount of change).

Low p-value basically means how surprising your data would be if there were actually no effect (ie less than 5% of the time you’ll get this due to randomness if there is no change — which is rather impossible)

Sample size matters heavily. With more observations, estimates become more precise, so increasingly small differences can become statistically significant. With a large sample, you can therefore get a tiny, practically meaningless effect with a very small p-value.

Eg effect of $1 can be statistically significant (not random) which does not matter in practical terms if average is like $10000.

So the key point here is not only to look at the p-value but also at an actual change. If a drug gives you only 0.01% more hair, it doesn’t matter to you that it is guaranteed.


Replies

ViscountPenguintoday at 8:08 AM

One of the really awkward points of stats is that not only does sample size matter, but also model specification. Very small misspecifications can easily lead to infinitesimal P values over large sample sizes.

Similar things are true of Bayesian stats, leading to things like predictively oriented posteriors being studied nowadays.