p-hacking: try it yourself!

It’s not new, but it’s still worth sharing:

The instructions go: “You’re a social scientist with a hunch: The U.S. economy is affected by whether Republicans or Democrats are in office. Try to show that a connection exists, using real data going back to 1948. For your results to be publishable in an academic journal, you’ll need to prove that they are “statistically significant” by achieving a low enough p-value.”

The tool is here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

And more on p-hacking here: Wikipedia — to understand why “success” in the above is not what it seems.

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