Sharpen statistical significance: Evidence thresholds and Bayes factors sharpened into Occam's razor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Occam's razor suggests assigning more prior probability to a hypothesis corresponding to a simpler distribution of data than to a hypothesis with a more complex distribution of data, other things equal. An idealization of Occam's razor in terms of the entropy of the data distributions tends to favor the null hypothesis over the alternative hypothesis. As a result, lower p values are needed to attain the same level of evidence. A recently debated argument for lowering the significance level to 0.005 as the p value threshold for a new discovery and to 0.05 for a suggestive result would then support further lowering them to 0.001 and 0.01, respectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.071 | 0.359 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".