Statistically Funny

She's right to be worried! There are so many possible cracks that bias can seep through, nudging clinical trial results off course. Some of the biggest come from people knowing which comparison group a participant will be, or has been, in. Allocation...

This fortune cookie could start a few scuffles. It's offering a cheerful scenario if you are looking for a benefit of a treatment, for example. But it sure would suck if you are measuring a harm! That's not what's contentious about it, though.
It's the p values and their size that can get things very heated. The p value is the result you get from a standard test for statistical significance. It can't tell you if a hypothesis is true or not, or rule out coincidence. What it can do is measure...

Imagine if weather reports only gave the expected average temperature across a whole country. You wouldn't want to be counting on that information when you were packing for a trip to Alaska or Hawaii, would you?
Yet that's what reports about the strength of scientific results typically do. They will give you some indication of how "good" the whole study is: and leave you with the misleading impression that the "goodness" applies to every result....

Cupid's famous arrow causes people to fall blindly in love with each other. That can end happily ever after. Not so with his lesser known "immortal time bias" arrow! That one causes researchers to fall blindly in love with profoundly flawed results ...