The World of Research Has Gone Berserk: Modeling the Consequences of Requiring “Greater Statistical Stringency” for Scientific Publication
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
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower the highly criticized p<0.05 significance threshold. While pros and cons are vigorously debated, there has been little to no modeling of how adopting these measures might affect what type of science is published. In this paper, we develop a novel optimality model that, given current incentives to publish, predicts a researcher's most rational use of resources in terms of the number of studies to undertake, the statistical power to devote to each study, and the desirable pre-study odds to pursue. We then develop a methodology that allows one to estimate the reliability of published research by considering a distribution of preferred research strategies. Using this approach, we investigate the merits of adopting measures of `greater statistical stringency' with the goal of informing the ongoing debate.
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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 | 0.186 | 0.053 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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