The science of status

For quite some time now I have been concerned with the quality of the science that we see in journals in fields like Medicine and Biology. Statistics play a fundamental role in the experimental method necessary for the development of much of human science, but what we see is the science of publishing rather that the science of evidence. Statistical Inference has been disseminated as tool for getting your paper published rather that making science. A as result the bad use of statistics in papers that offer not replicable results are widespread. Here is an interesting paper about the subject.

Unfortunately not only the scientific research lose with the low quality of research and misuse of statistics. The Statistics itself lose by being distrusted as a whole for many people that end up considering the statistical method as faulty and not appropriated when its use by not proficient researchers is to blame.

What is our role as statisticians? We need to do the right thing. We should not be blinded by the easy status that comes with our name in a paper after running a regression analysis. We need to be more than softwares pilots that press buttons for those own the data. We need to question, to understand the problem and to make sure the regression is the right thing to do. If we don't remember the regression class we need to go back and refresh our memory before using statistical models. We need to start ding the right thing and knowing what we are doing. Then we need to pursue and criticize the publications that use faulty statistics because we are among the few who can identify faulty statistics. For the most part the researchers run models that they don't understand and get away with it because nobody else understand it as well.

But often we are among them, we are pleased with our name in publications, and we are happy to go the easiest way.

I decided to write this after a quick argument in a virtual community of statistician, where I noticed a well quoted statistician spreading the wrong definition o p-value.  We can't afford to have this kind of thing inside our own community, we need to know what is a p-value...