Statistics

Extinction isn’t random — but the 26-million-year pulse Raup found is not a law of nature.

A well-designed experiment and an underpowered one can ask the identical question and still deserve opposite trust. The gap between them is arithmetic, and across whole fields the arithmetic has not been going well.

Signal detection theory, formalised in 1954 out of radar research and set out for psychology by Green and Swets in 1966, split a single accuracy score into two things: how well someone can actually tell signal from noise, and how readily they say yes at all.

A single mail-out to British doctors in 1951 settled the smoking debate — but only for men, and only for death.

In 2015 a coordinated effort to redo 100 published psychology experiments found only 36 per cent reproduced the original significant result, effect sizes roughly halved on average — a number that turned scattered doubts into a named crisis.