Decimal Dust, Significant Digits, and the Search for Stars
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The practice of rounding statistical results to two decimal places is one of a large number of heuristics followed in the social sciences. In evaluating this heuristic, the authors conducted simulations to investigate the precision of simple correlations. They considered a true correlation of .15 and ran simulations in which the sample sizes were 60, 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000. They then looked at the digits in the correlations’ first, second, and third decimal places to determine their reproducibility. They conclude that when n < 500, the habit of reporting a result to two decimal places seems unwarranted, and it never makes sense to report the third digit after the decimal place unless one has a sample size larger than 100,000. Similar results were found with rhos of .30, .50, and .70. The results offer an important qualification to what is otherwise a misleading practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it