test

Testing a Theory Without an Experiment

January 25, 2018
You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I aspire to use this approach significantly more often than I do now. How to Test a Theory Without...
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Testing Too Many Hypotheses

October 10, 2011
For each dataset, there is a limit to what we can use that dataset to test. Using the standard p-value based methods of science, the more hypotheses we check against the data, the more likely it will be that some of these checks give inaccurate conclusions. And this presents a big problem for the way science is practiced. Let's take an example to illustrate the principle. Suppose that you have information about 1000 people selected at random from the U.S. adult population. Your dataset includ...
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