From the course: Everyday Statistics, with Eddie Davila

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P-hacking

P-hacking

- [Instructor] Suppose you're one of 200 researchers, but only a few of you will get to keep your research jobs. In order to keep your job, you must publish a paper with significant findings. A significant finding would be an outcome that has a p-value smaller than 0.05. Okay, so what's a p-value? A p-value is the calculated probability. If the p-value is below 5%, it's deemed significant. For example, if we flip a coin 10 times and get heads eight times, is this statistically significant? If the p-value is less than 0.05, this might be deemed a publishable result. If it's higher than 0.05, no luck. So let's go back to our 200 competitive researchers. I give all 200 researchers the same massive pool of government data. We'd like to research whether or not going to college makes you a better parent. As a researcher, you could develop an interesting hypothesis. You could pick a number of variables from the data set, and then use those variables and the related data set to test your…

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